


Parlor Tricks

by CyanideBreathmint



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-20
Updated: 2010-08-20
Packaged: 2017-10-11 04:29:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/108410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It has been ten months since the inception job. Eames and Arthur perform an extraction for Saito in Singapore, but the subject is not who they originally anticipated it to be, nor is the job as straightforward (or safe!) as it seems. Mostly gen, some slash overtones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a prompt from [nagaina_ryuuoh](http://nagaina-ryuuoh.livejournal.com/), which was in turn based on the Lady Gaga song _Bad Romance._ Major spoilers for the movie itself and its ending. Hopefully first in a series of other long fics exploring what everyone is doing after the end of _Inception._ Much thanks and love to [heronymus_waat](http://heronymus-waat.livejournal.com/) for the beta and proofread.

JFK to Narita to Singapore was a brutally long flight even with the comforts of first class, its tedium made bearable with discipline, familiarity and small quantities of excellent wine. And also, Arthur thought, by Eames' absence this time round. It seemed to him that the forger took entirely too much pleasure in attempting to drive him insane. He felt Ariadne's absence a little more strongly; she had been a warm bright spot, smart and pretty as she was, in the obsessive planning of the Fischer job. Saito had informed him that she had declined this job in order to continue her studies in Paris, and in any case there was little need for a full-time architect on this job, which was mostly counter-extraction training. If everything worked out, this job would be easy corporate gravy, more of the do-nothing stuff he had been filling his days with in the past few months.

Something nagged at him, though, as he sat staring out into darkness, listening to the quiet snores of his fellow passengers. With Cobb, Yusuf and Ariadne gone from the team and back to their daily lives he felt as though he had lost something with their parting. Extraction wasn't generally the kind of thing you made friends doing. The few experts at dream infiltration all tended to move in the same circles but those relationships tended to be entirely professional. Cobb was the one person he knew from his work who he could also count as a personal friend.

Reflexively he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his loaded die, rolling the smooth plastic between his fingers as he attempted to palm it yet again. He had left everything behind so he could chase the world of dreams, but in moments like this he wondered about the trick of substitution that made it feel as though the dreams were chasing him instead. The clink and rattle of the die against his empty wineglass interrupted his reverie as he fumbled the French drop; his reflexes took over and he caught the die before it could fall to the floor and roll all the way to the front of the First Class compartment. He rolled the die around in the palm of his hand again, and then sighed quietly. Leaning back in his seat, he shut his eyes and hoped that he had finally become tired enough to fall asleep without too much of a struggle this time.

Getting to sleep had always been something of an ordeal for Arthur. Behind his closed eyes his mind remained restless and active with an intensity that he found both maddening and ironic. He spent too much of his professional life in a drugged sleep, working his dreams away, but in his private time sleep tended to frustrate and elude him. He would lie awake with his eyes closed, chasing the specter of slumber only to jerk awake as his legs twitched, or sit up wildly with his hand searching his nightstand for a pencil stub and scratch paper as a problem solved itself in that miraculous hypnagogic state between sleeping and waking. This time he distracted himself by recalling the contents of the dossier Saito had given him, clutching the die like a talisman as he waited for his consciousness to slip its moorings again.

 

Arthur made it through Customs at Changi International Airport with little fanfare; to the authorities he was another anonymous business traveler here to make and spend money. Thanks to Saito's legerdemain and the offer of a consultancy he pretty much was an anonymous business traveler. He hauled his rolling suitcase off the carousel and walked on still-wobbly legs toward the sliding glass doors into the Arrival Hall. His garment bag sagged against the cashmere overcoat he had draped over his forearm and the weight of his laptop bag pressed the contents of his trouser pocket painfully against his hip. Everything had been arranged beforehand; he would take a taxicab to the hotel, sleep off his jet lag, and meet Saito's representative tomorrow morning.

"Fancy meeting you here," he heard someone say in a voice and tone that was entirely too familiar to him. Arthur froze in place as he spotted Eames standing in the concourse on the other side of the railing. Eames had had a haircut in the time between the Fischer job and now, and his dark hair stuck out spikily from his scalp. It was a definite improvement, Arthur thought. Unfortunately his dress sense had not improved in the past few months. His jeans were ripped in one knee, and the Smiths t-shirt he wore looked as though it had dated back to before the band had actually broken up. He was holding a small, portable dry-erase board with Arthur's name scrawled loosely on it with black marker, in a hand that looked eerily like his own. It wasn't the name he had been born with, of course, but he had stopped answering to his birth name years ago.

"Eames. What the hell are you doing here?" Arthur hissed over the railing at him. The letters on Eames' t-shirt had started to shimmer in his gaze as his vision blurred from exhaustion. Maybe he was so sleep-deprived that he had started to hallucinate.

"Welcoming you to the Lion City, of course. You might want to move. It appears you're blocking their way," he said, nodding to the travelers caught up behind Arthur who tutted impatiently as they waited for him to start walking again. Arthur took a deep breath and continued walking. He headed out towards the large lettered signs and their promise of a taxi stand.

"Not so fast," Eames said, steering him down an escalator instead. "Saito's minder is down at the car park with our ride out of here."

Arthur waited for his jet-lagged brain to process that statement before he formulated his next question. "If Saito sent a minder to get me then why did he let you do his job?"   
"Her, actually, and because I have a way with women. And also, because I told her we were old friends." Eames' smile was just wide enough to make Arthur uncomfortable. The locals' summer-weight attire reminded him of the tropical climate that the air-conditioning in the airport was letting him ignore at the moment; back in New York it was still snowing, twenty-two hours ago and a dozen time zones away. It occurred belatedly to him that winter-weight merino was probably not the best thing to be wearing right on the Equator.

"Working together doesn't make us friends. I don't want to be friends," he said. After he had stepped off the escalator he switched his suitcase and coat to his other hand and made an attempt at shrugging his rumpled suit jacket off his right arm.

"You wound me, darling," Eames took Arthur's coat and his laptop bag in a gesture that surprised him. "Maybe you'll have better luck with her. You like your women slender and dark, don't you?"

"What I like is none of your business," Arthur sighed, trying to swallow a yawn and knowing that he had lost the exchange this time round.

 

The heat in the parking level hit Arthur like a soft, meaty fist driven into his solar plexus, the air humid enough that it was difficult to breathe. Eames steered him towards a white Benz, conspicuous among the other vehicles parked there. Too many of the other cars were tiny, Japanese or Korean, vehicle makes he wasn't familiar with. The steering wheels were all on the wrong side. He spent the next moment feeling deeply, wildly baffled before his brain made the connection.

"Oh, right. They drive on the left here, like the British," he said, realizing just how stupid he sounded just after he said it.

"Like us, yes," Eames said as they walked around the back of the car.

"A former British colony, in fact," he heard a woman say, "Like America." Saito's minder was leaning against the drivers' side door, her arms crossed over the front of her severe white blouse. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Arthur. I'm Janine Lee. Mr. Saito has asked me to make sure your stay's a pleasant and comfortable one." She was short and slim and Chinese, her deep whisky voice oddly mismatched with her frame.

"I'll open the boot if you'll get his suitcase, Mr. Eames," she said, opening the door and climbing in. The black pencil skirt she was wearing slid up her thigh and it took Arthur a moment to realize that he was tired enough to be staring in an obvious manner. If she had noticed him staring she was also very good at pretending not to notice, and he slid wearily into the back seat, his garment bag rustling loudly as he dropped it on the empty seat beside him. Eames climbed in the car a few short minutes later, sliding next to Arthur in the back seat with a knowing smile, crushing his garment bag between them. "Well. Now that we're all here, Miss Lee," catching her eye in the rear-view mirror. She nodded and turned the key in the ignition, pulling the car out of the parking garage.

 

They had been driving down the expressway at sixty kilometers a second – ridiculously slow by Arthur's American standards – when Lee started to talk. The sky was ridiculously blue and the sun seemed like a bright neon contrast to the leaden winter sky Arthur had left behind in New York.

"Firstly, Mr. Saito told me that you were not expecting Mr. Eames to be here," she said, "and that you had been briefed on this job being an anti-extraction. Unfortunately, circumstances changed while you were somewhere between JFK and Narita airports." Her accent was a smooth blend of English vowel enunciation and Chinese consonants; similar to that of the other locals he'd heard talking on his way out of the airport.

"If that's the case, how did you get him here before me?" Arthur asked, his eyes narrowing. He reached again for the die in his pocket. Exhaustion came and went, but the reflex never really left him.

"I was in Indonesia, catching a little sun and surf in Bali," Eames said. He was sitting a little too close to, and leaning a little too much into Arthur. He was never very good at respecting anyone's personal space.

"Right. And you expect me to believe that," Arthur muttered, shifting in his seat just enough to jab Eames in the flank with an elbow.

"Always such a doubter, Arthur," Eames said, shifting away from the jab and giving him a precious inch of space. "I could show you my sunburn to prove it, if you wanted."

"I assume you've read the dossier, Mr. Arthur?" Lee asks, all business, staring up at them in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were so dark they might almost have been black, and God only knew what she thought of Eames' flagrant attempts at flirting.

"Kojiro Hanamura, chief operations officer for Ishinomori Incorporated, one of Saito's fronts," Arthur said, dredging the facts up from his blurry memory. "I was asked to help militarize his subconscious."

"Indeed you were. However, Mr. Saito received some interesting intelligence eighteen hours ago that indicates that Hanamura has already been compromised."

"Saito wants us to perform an extraction on Hanamura. Find out how much he's leaked, and who subverted him."

"That explains your presence," Arthur said, giving Eames a pointed look.

"Oh, come on, I still love you even if you didn't bring me anything from Duty Free," Eames said, his expression just too serious to actually be taken seriously.

Arthur glanced at his watch; seventeen minutes past four. Singapore was fortunately currently twelve hours ahead of Eastern, which left him with little mental math to do. "How about Dom? Did Saito call him in, too?"

"Cobb sends his regrets," Eames said, shaking his head. "Also, he wants me to remind you that you owe Phillipa the piggy-back ride that you promised her a month ago."

Arthur's hands shifted upwards from covering a yawn to rub at a forehead that had been aching from tension and weariness. "So, almost like old days," he said, his voice muffled by his hands.

"Almost. Easier, though, and probably less you getting shot in the knee." The garment bag rustled again as Eames yanked it free from between them both, laying it across his lap.

"Cobb told you about that?" Arthur asked before he yawned again, sagging back in the seat. His second wind was leaving him at that very moment, the exhaustion of the twenty-eight hour journey hitting like a sandbag to the forehead.

"Saito, actually," Eames said, catching his eye. "He thought the look on your face was the funniest thing on earth."

"That's rather amusing coming from a man who got shot in the chest," he muttered. The urge to close his eyes and rest for a few minutes was almost unbearable.

"Why don't you take a short nap? I'll wake you when we get to the hotel," Eames said, his expression surprisingly gentle. Arthur pursed his lips for a brief moment, his hand reaching for his totem again. A look passed between them and hung in the air for a tense second before he made a conscious decision to discard the gesture.

 

The short nap, a long, hot shower and a change of clothes went a long way towards putting Arthur's head back together. Now he felt less like his head had exploded somewhere over the Atlantic, and more like the pieces of his mind had been crudely reassembled and were now held together with wet toilet paper. There were times in his life when he missed military coffee (the kind with roughly three times the caffeine of the normal stuff), and this was shaping up to be one of them. There was only really one way to deal with jet lag, and it involved staying awake until bedtime, local time, and just gutting it through until one's circadian rhythm finally picked itself up from the hideous abuse it had taken.

Arthur set his razor back down on the bathroom counter and splashed his face with cold water again. He had used some of the steam from his hot shower to work some of the worst wrinkles out of the Burberry he had worn on the flight here, in case he had to wear it again before it could be cleaned properly. Not that he seriously expected to have to wear a winter-weight suit in a tropical country; everyone seemed to dress more casually here simply because of the brutal heat and humidity. He just liked being prepared.   
He had just finished pulling on a pair of summer-weight trousers when he heard a gentle, hesitant knock at the door of his suite. Quickly he tugged an undershirt over his head before he crossed to the door and stared through the peephole. Lee was standing in the hallway outside, her face more animated than before. Eames stood beside her, his hands gesturing as they talked. Already Eames was turning on the charm, he thought, letting out a long, weary sigh before he pulled back on the latch and let them in.

"I just thought you should know," Eames said as the door shut behind him, "that you take longer to get dressed than my last girlfriend did."

"What's the plan?" Arthur asked, pointedly ignoring Eames' zinger.

"First, here's the phone you'll be using while you're here. It's been cloned off of a dummy account. We use a GSM network here, which makes that easier. All the numbers you need have been pre-programmed. It's been hacked to not trace incoming or outgoing calls and the only people who have this number are us," Lee said, handing a sleek little cellular phone over to him. "I can brief you now, but I thought it should really happen after you've had a chance to sleep. If you're up for it we could go get some dinner."

"If I sleep now I'm going to be awake at three in the morning," Arthur said as he checked the number listings. He pocketed the cellphone and reached into the suitcase on his bed for a shirt. "Dinner would be fine with me." He settled on one and then put it on, running his hands down the placket front and then fastening the buttons from the bottom up.

"Good. Eating's one of the national obsessions," she said with a quick smile, "Not that we have much else to do here."

 

Lee got them all chicken rice for dinner. The place didn't look like much; a few little food stalls set in an old shophouse façade, with plastic chairs and folding tables for the diners. This place reminded him of the little hole-in-the-wall barbeque places out in the Carolinas, where they did only one thing, but did it really well. A small knot of loud old men sat around a wall-mounted television watching soccer – what the locals would have called football – and a ceiling fan rattled softly overhead. The heat was, at least, becoming more bearable as the sun started going down in the sky. Whole cooked chickens, heads and all, were hanging from iron hooks in a rack in one of the little stalls, something that made him think, oddly enough, of _A Christmas Story_.

"I know this isn't the French Laundry or anything like it, but I personally think it's the best damn chicken rice in the country," Lee said, a little defensively, after she had made their orders. "Besides," she continued, her voice dropping as she did, "It's almost impossible to eavesdrop on a quiet conversation in a place like this, and I thought that might be helpful."   
Their dinner arrived shortly after they had made their drinks order; three plates of mounded white rice with slivers of cucumber and chicken on the sides. It looked a little boring – white chicken on white rice – but tasted amazing. The rice was soft and pillowy, each grain infused with hints of chicken and ginger and something aromatic like coconut, but wasn't quite.

"I think this is almost as good as the last time I went to the French Laundry," Arthur said after a long silence had fallen over their table, punctuated only by the sounds of eating. The chicken came with a tiny dish of brilliantly red sauce that turned out to be minced chili peppers spiked with garlic and more ginger. Sweat ran down his brow, and he swiped at his face with a hand before his eyes started stinging.

"The price tag's a definite improvement, don't you think?" Eames said, leaning back in his chair as he clutched a longneck of the local beer. The only remnants of his dinner were a few wayward chicken bones and some broken crumbs of rice stuck to his spoon. "That was three SGD a plate, which makes it… a quid and change per head."

"That's a quid and change per head that Mr. Saito is playing for. But your point about the pricing is taken." Lee was driving and she had declined the beer, drinking from a can of soda instead. Near them some of the old men roared and shouted as someone scored a goal.

"I'm really not in any kind of shape to think much right now," Arthur murmured after wiping at his face and mouth with a tissue, "but you said you were going to brief us. Considering the change in circumstances I think it'd be good if we talked about this."

"Mr. Saito has acquired some intelligence that suggests that Hanamura has leaked some data that only the both of them are privy to. The specifics of the leak are uncertain and Mr. Saito does not want to show his hand by committing himself to an investigation of the leak. Everything about Hanamura's profile and behavior suggests he's completely loyal to the company. He sees the work he does at the corporation as his legacy. He's well compensated, so bribery very likely isn't the reason why. No gambling habits, no unexpected debts. He's sitting on a comfortable retirement fund right now."

"So we can scratch out Money and Ideology," Arthur said, counting out the potential motivations on his fingers. "What about Compromise and Ego?"

"Mr. Saito has had private investigators keeping an eye on Hanamura, and his behavior hasn't changed. We have no reason to believe he is currently being blackmailed or coerced. He's a boring man," Lee said, "He has a mistress, but it's an open secret. He and his wife are divorced, anyway."

"What do you think about this case?" Eames asked, "You've been on this longer than we have, you must have some kind of opinion about it." He had finished his beer and was beckoning for another. Beads of condensation from the outside of the bottle had left a little puddle on the scratched plastic of the folding table.

"I can't say that I've been working this one longer than you have. Mr. Saito has security making sure that nobody tries to make a grab on Hanamura before you train him. My job is to coordinate what you're doing and make sure you have what you need on the local end. It hasn't changed with your assignment changing." Lee said, "If you ask me, though, I think either Hanamura has no idea that he's been compromised, or that whoever has compromised him is using him as bait. There's no other explanation for why he isn't covering his tracks." She drummed her fingertips impatiently on the tabletop before finishing her soft drink.

There was another lull of silence as two young men came in the coffee shop and sat down at a table near theirs. They wore plaster-stained clothes and one clutched a folded Chinese newspaper in his hand. They looked like construction workers sitting down for a quick dinner, but Arthur watched them, anyway. He had learned, a long time ago, to do a quick visual assessment through his peripheral vision.

"What are they saying?" Eames asked, as the men started talking loudly enough to be heard even over the television and the clink of beer glasses. Arthur recognized the language as Cantonese but did not understand it enough to make out what they were saying.

Lee listened intently for a moment, and then covered her mouth with a hand as she laughed, her chuckle soft, low and almost inaudible in the background noise. "They're complaining that your presence probably means the stallholder is going to jack up his prices soon. They think you're tourists here for the casino resort."

"Half right, I suppose. I wouldn't mind a go at the tables, myself," Eames said. Somehow he had made a casino chip appear in his hand, out of nowhere. He rolled it slowly between his fingers, before making it vanish again.

Arthur watched the coin trick with a kind of weary fascination. Intellectually he knew how such tricks worked; he had even made an attempt to learn them himself, but Eames' hands were like a conjurer's, surprisingly graceful despite their size. "I wouldn't if I were you," he said at last, "They're pretty strict about cheating over here."

"I would never cheat." Eames sounded indignant at what Arthur had just said, enough so to be fairly convincing. "That loaded die business is more your kind of thing."

"I don't carry it because I gamble," Arthur said wearily, "I carry that thing to remind myself that games of chance are always rigged in someone's favor."

"You don't like taking any chances, do you?" Eames asked softly, dropping his arch smile for a moment, his expression surprisingly serious and sober.

"Never," Arthur said, looking away as he did so, refusing to meet Eames' gaze.

 

The drive back to the hotel seemed to blur into a hallucination of city lights and darkening sky as Arthur sat in the back seat of the Benz, drifting in that drowsy, liminal state between sleep and wakefulness that came from utter exhaustion. The movement lulled him, and he had started to lose track of his whereabouts when he felt a soft tickle of breath against his ear. The sensation jolted him awake with a start.

"Wake up, pet. We're here." Eames was leaning over him from the open passenger side door, shaking him with surprising gentleness. "I told you he was asleep," he said to Lee with a grin as he turned to face her. "I think we should get our Sleeping Beauty to bed before the rose-bushes grow up around us."

Arthur wanted to say something to that, a pointed rejoinder of some sort, but a yawn overtook him, squeezing tears out of his eyes even as he tried to swallow it. Lee walked him back up to his room despite his protestations that he could find his own way back up. The worried look on her face told him that he probably looked like hell, which was how he felt. As he stepped out of the elevator into the landing he heard Eames putting on the charm as he talked to the handler. "We should probably let Arthur sleep off his jet lag," he had said, "How would you like to have a drink before you go, you and me?" It figured that Eames would taunt him like that, knowing how much Lee was his type, and then attempt to seduce her himself.

"I don't think so, Eames," she said, dropping the formality with a faint smile on her face. She glanced at the watch on her wrist, and then looked back up at the both of them. "I have to go. Need to relieve the day-shift nurse. See you both tomorrow," she said, leaving without further explanation. The elevator dinged softly as the doors slid shut.

Arthur shook his head as Eames watched her go. "You know that she's probably going to tell Saito that you're trying to pick her up, right?"

"It was worth a try," Eames said as a knowing smirk spread across his face.

Arthur stopped trying to feed his keycard in the lock on his room door and stared hard at him. "Ariadne told you about that," he managed to say after his brain finally processed the thought through a fog of drowsiness.

"I told you I have a way with women." Eames was standing beside him, close enough that he could catch a hint of aftershave and clean sweat and the bitter, floral notes of hopped beer. "Men too," he said, almost as an afterthought. His smirk grew wider, blossoming into a mischievous smile. Arthur felt his heart skip a beat through the fog of exhaustion and then took a deep breath that filled his head with light.

"Good night, Eames," he said flatly, before he took a step back into his room and shut the door in his face. Arthur sat down on his bed and took a few slow moments to calm down before he took his shoes off. His tension headache had returned, and he wanted sleep more than anything else in the world. His pulse was still racing, and as he undressed and climbed into bed he admitted to himself that he wasn't quite sure if what he had felt then had been anger.

 

Arthur started planning in earnest at eight the next morning, over a room service breakfast of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. He wasn't completely over the jet lag yet; he had woken up twice in the middle of the night, once with a sudden sense of falling like a kick delivered too soon, and the second with a stab of loneliness and frustration so intense that he had felt his teeth buzzing like a pane of window glass resonating to a train whistle. Fortunately he had managed to deal with his stray thoughts in the indeterminate time between when he crawled out of bed and when he had ordered his breakfast from room service, and now he was all business.

Most extractors tended to be well-connected individuals; it came with the job description. Arthur found himself working with a geographical blind spot in Singapore. Most of his contacts were spread across the US and Europe, with a significant number in Tokyo and Taiwan. Southeast Asia was not a place he had operated extensively in at all. This meant a certain paucity of sources for the background checks and research he did on their mark when he was point.

He sat at the desk in his room fuelling his concentration with cup after cup of black coffee, going over the dossier that Saito had sent him in New York. His Moleskine notebook sat within reach of his hand, filled with his own observations. A series of phone calls to contacts in Taiwan and Japan had also given him a few local phone numbers to try.   
"I think Lee might be right," he told Eames as he let him into his hotel room somewhere around nine, after he had spent nearly an hour spent obsessively reading and re-reading the file. Arthur made sure the door was properly shut before he spoke again. "I don't think Hanamura knows he's been compromised."

Eames nodded and helped himself to a cup of coffee. "I'd trust her instincts if I were you. She used to work the local extraction scene. Ran into her once while I was working in Hong Kong."

That brought Arthur up short. "If she's an extractor, then why did Saito hire us for this?"

"That would be because she doesn't do this any more. She quit years ago, but the reason she quit isn't something I'm privy to," Eames looked around for a place to sit, ignoring the couch and armchair before he lowered himself onto the bed with a faint creak of bedsprings. "You made your own bed," he said, the tone of his voice vaguely impressed and incredulous at the same time, "Do you not know that they have housekeeping for this?"

Arthur pointedly ignored him, staring instead at the Hanamura dossier. He had laid the papers out on the desk and was standing so he could look down at the pages as a whole.   
There was a jingling sound as Eames stood up, reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a handful of change. "What are you doing?" Arthur asked, turning to stare at him.

"I think I could bounce a coin off of this." Eames put the coffee cup down on the nightstand and sorted through the change in the palm of his hand, picking out a Singaporean fifty-cent coin – a coin close in size to an American quarter.

"It won't work," Arthur said, fighting the irrational urge to smile.

"And how do you know that?" Eames flipped the coin onto the middle of the bed, where it landed with a faint thud on top of the quilted comforter. The look of disappointment on his face made Arthur start to explain, despite himself.

"You can't bounce a quarter off a bed if there's a comforter on top," he said, his hands in his pockets, fingertips brushing against the loaded die, "It has to be just a blanket and sheets because the batting is too soft otherwise."

"So it is," Eames said. He collected his cup of coffee and sat back down, making no move to pick up the coin he had attempted to bounce off the sheets.

"Aren't you going to take that back?" Arthur asked, glancing at the coin glinting dully in the middle of his bed.

"Keep the change," Eames said, with a slow, dirty smile, his eyes alight with mischief. Arthur took a deep breath and turned back to his papers, his mouth suddenly dry, hoping that he could get this job done before Eames actually managed to drive him fully insane.

 

Lee showed up to collect them some time around eleven. This time she was dressed even more casually than Eames was, in faded, ratty jeans and an oversized t-shirt. She drove them to what would become their headquarters in some rented office space in the buildings around a shopping arcade within walking distance from their hotel. The office was private, anonymous, the rooms themselves accessible only by authorized keycard. The offices were hushed and empty, the carpet marked by the footprints of desks and cubicles that had moved out with its former occupants some time ago. Several metal-framed lawn chairs sat near the pale curve of carpet that marked where the receptionist's desk had once been.

"Secure warehouse space is a little hard to come by here," Lee said as she let them in. "In any event, I thought you'd prefer somewhere that was air-conditioned."

"Thanks," Arthur said as he looked around the empty rooms, looking for a place where he could sit and think and read. In the end he set himself up in what once had been a conference room, pinning his notes to the wall to keep track of the data they had already collected. Additions and corrections written on color-coded sticky notes fluttered like feathers in the constant draft from the air-conditioning system.

"I know this is probably a little early to ask," Lee said, looking in at him from the doorway as he organized his workspace, "but have you got any ideas?"

"Actually, yes," he said, "I do."

 

Eames had stretched himself out full-length on one of the lawn chairs, his lips moving soundlessly as he read one of the dossiers to himself again. "What is it?" he asked as he saw Arthur come in, spreading the folder out over his lap. "The look on your face tells me you have an idea."

"I'm going to proceed as we usually do on an extraction." Arthur said as he grabbed an office chair to sit in. It was so new it still had plastic wrap stretched over the seat cushion, and it crinkled as he sat down in it. "Right now I'm shaking down my contacts to see if I can get the information I need, but Southeast Asia isn't my usual area of operations and I don't have the network I usually have in this case."

"That's what Saito hired me for. I know you always take point, but I can help you with the legwork and introduce you to some of my contacts." Lee said, leaning against the wall by Eames' seat. One of her shoelaces was undone, but it didn't seem like she had noticed.

"That would be helpful, thanks," Arthur said, glancing down at the notes he had jotted down in his black Moleskine notebook, the letters printed rather than handwritten. "Tomorrow, a new executive is going to transfer into Hanamura's office."

"And that new executive would be…" Lee glanced at Eames, and then at Arthur, raising an eyebrow.

"Me." The word was drawn out into a grunt as Eames stretched his arms upwards, his fingers locked and t-shirt riding up to expose a sliver of hip still flushed with mild sunburn. A tattoo writhed across the surface of his skin and vanished beneath the hem of his t-shirt and the waistband of his jeans.

"You," Arthur said. He found himself looking down then, picking at the lint on the fabric of his trousers. "And you get to observe his co-workers closely in case you need to forge their likenesses. Meanwhile, Lee and I get as much intel as we can about him."

"Unimaginative but reliable. I like it." Something about the way Eames had said it made Arthur think that he had been talking about more than just the plan.

"I'll make the call," Lee said, pulling out her own cellphone. There was a small glittery charm hanging from it, something pink and girlish and completely at odds with her businesslike demeanor.

"You do realize what this means, though," Eames said, glancing at Arthur, his expression gently mischievous.

"What?" Arthur asked, taking the bait out of curiosity.

"I am going to have to go clothes shopping today." Eames started to climb out of the lawn chair, levering himself up on one elbow before swinging his feet from the footrest onto the floor. Lee smiled that faint smile again, and then tossed him the keys to the Benz, which he caught in his hand.

"Company car," she said. "Just don't wreck it and we should be fine."

Eames stood up, bowed gallantly in reply and then left the office, the door clicking quietly shut behind him.

 

Lee borrowed another car – an Audi – from Saito's front company and took Arthur on a short trip out of the office, ostensibly to buy some office supplies. She took several detours on the way back, and introduced Arthur to a few of the people she had worked with three years ago. Money exchanged hands on two of the five meetings; crisp bills that looked like Monopoly money to Arthur's American eyes. The first contact worked as a private eye; he spent most of his time chasing down cheating husbands until something more interesting came along. The second was a young man who sold pirated videogames and VCDs off a folding table in a hawker center; the police were serious enough that the local triad presence tended towards lower-key activities like this. Two more of the meetings were impersonal business introductions, one to a hacker who worked out of the back room of a print shop that catered to the business-card market, and the other to an information broker who spent most of her time doing legitimate patent research. The last was a visit to a private residence in a densely-packed suburb full of little duplex houses, to a retiree whose former profession was purposefully left unclear in the little conversation. He offered them sweet, fragrant tea, and recommended that they go to the nearby hawker center for oyster omelettes, which they did.

Lee dropped him off at the offices some time around four-thirty and left to do whatever else she did for Saito here in Singapore. This left Arthur alone in the office to plan the labyrinth that they would need for the eventual extraction, and he worked oblivious to the lengthening shadows or the changing colors of the sky. Ariadne was a true savant with dream-architecture, but Arthur had, some time in the past, been trained enough to pinch-hit as an architect from time to time. He wasn't as gifted a draftsman or designer as she was, but he made up for that with obsessive attention to detail and an ability to concentrate that bordered on hyperfocus. He had left his laptop powered on from the brief interlude where he had he trawled the Internet for photo references of places closely connected to Hanamura's life. One of the other folders on the desk contained photographs of other locations, private places one would not find through a search engine. He didn't need the specificity of those images this early in the design process, but he liked having them committed to his visual memory, fodder for one of those predawn hypnagogic bursts of inspiration.

Arthur wasn't sure what time it was when the card-lock in the door beeped, once, cheerfully informing him that someone was coming in. He looked up, only to remember belatedly that he didn't have a view to the reception area from the conference room he was working in. A quick glance at his watch told him that it was past seven. A look out the window through the blinds confirmed it. The tropical sky had started to turn a deep purple-blue, the faintest corona of pink and gold lingering in the horizon. He heard the latch of the door click shut and the faintest hint of a heavy tread muffled by the pile of the carpet. As though on cue, Eames stuck his head through the doorway of Arthur's improvised studio.

"I knew I'd find you here," he said, stepping through the doorway.

"You could have called me," Arthur said, putting his pencil down. His hand was stiff from the non-stop drawing, the muscles at the base of his thumb threatening to cramp. The skin on the outside edge of his hand and on the curl of his pinky was smudged with graphite that he had picked up off his preparatory sketches. He cracked his knuckles in an attempt to relieve the tension in his hand and wrist.

"I didn't have to, to know where you were." Eames leaned over the layout Arthur was working on, studying it with some interest. "Once you get started on a job you don't stop. Have you even remembered to get something to eat?"

"You are not my mother, Eames," Arthur said. He stood up at his desk, neck and shoulders sore from the way he had sat half-hunched over his work.

"I could be her if you want." Eames' offer was made in a mock-innocent tone of voice, his facial expression at once cherubic and obscene and silly.

"No thank you." Arthur worked the stiffness out of his shoulders as they left the office, taking careful inventory of his aches and discomfort. He felt thirst, but little actual hunger. "I don't know why," he said, "but I just haven't been very hungry."

"It's the bloody heat. Kills your appetite," Eames said, as they waited for the elevator. "We should go somewhere cooler, and I know just the place."

 

Eames was still driving the Benz that Lee had lent him, and when Arthur opened the door to climb in the passenger seat he noticed that the back seat of the car was full of shopping bags. He picked out Dunhill, Armani and Zegna from glimpses in the rear-view mirror. The thought of Eames in any of those designers was at once subtly cognitively dissonant and very appealing.

"I've almost forgotten how much I like it here. In small doses, of course," Eames said from the driver's seat as Arthur pulled his seatbelt on.

"I didn't think you'd ever like a country this conservative." It still felt subtly wrong to be a passenger sitting in the left side of the car.

"Oh, it isn't all bad," Eames said. "The food is good, the people are pretty and the shopping is absolutely _killer_. The government takes security very seriously, though, and sneaking across the straits to Malaysia for exfil is a bit of a pain in the arse."

"Dare I ask?" Arthur shot him a glance.

"Oh, it was nothing," he said, a little too lightly and innocently, "A little bit of nothing during the last ASEAN summit they held here."

"Did that nothing, perchance, have anything to do with how key members of the Burmese delegation left early on account of unspecified illness?" Arthur asked.

"No comment." Eames chose that moment to whistle a tune that Arthur did not recognize, cutting off further conversation. Arthur smiled quietly to himself. He'd not expected any kind of answer when he had asked that question. It was an unspoken truism of the extraction scene that most of the real experts had military or intelligence backgrounds simply because of how the tech had been developed and tested in the first place.

The whistling stopped two bars into the song as the car slowed to a stop at a red light. "You should do that more often, you know," Arthur turned away from the passenger side window to find Eames looking at him, his gaze opaque and intent.

"You mean I should ask you more interesting questions about clandestine activities you may or may not have undertaken in the recent past?"

"No, you idiot," Eames said affectionately, "_Smile._ Although I wouldn't mind answering other kinds of questions." The sly grin and the sidelong glance made it plain the kinds of questions that Arthur had no intention at all of asking.

 

The place Eames had in mind happened to be a very upscale Indian restaurant in a mall right by the Singapore River. He had no trouble finding his way over to Clarke Quay, but parking was another matter entirely. They eventually found parking space at a shopping center not far from the quay itself, and walked the rest of the way. A welcome breeze came off the water's surface as they crossed a bridge spanning the river. The ambient temperature still wasn't what Arthur would have called cool, but he felt his appetite start to stir as the wind whipped the end of his tie around.

"I'd call this place touristy," Eames said, "except most of the country's history is like this. Old British Raj-type architecture and neon lights side by side." Like Eames, Arthur thought, although he did not say it. They stood together at the quayside for a few minutes, appreciating the pleasing effects of light bouncing off the water. The air possessed a green muddy note of scent from the river water that wasn't actually unpleasant.

"We should go," Eames said after Arthur had started to turn away from the river. "I made reservations and I don't want to be late."

"You made reservations." Arthur raised an eyebrow at that, hoping that Eames didn't think this meant that they were dating.

"Come on, if we're late they'll have us wait around until they can put us somewhere, and I don't want to wait any more for my dinner."

They showed up ten minutes late for their reservation, but Eames' fears about having to wait were unfounded. A waiter seated them at a table near the bar shortly after he had confirmed their seating. Arthur pored over the menu and the wine list before finally settling on lager instead, uncertain on how the Australian Gewürztraminer he had had an eye on would actually stand up to the lamb he had ordered.

They ate for the most part in silence; Arthur had forgotten how hungry he had been while distracted by work and now his appetite had returned with a vengeance. He was halfway through his second beer when he decided to ask Eames a question that had been nagging him since the conclusion of the Fischer job.

"Why do you keep flirting with me?" he asked at last, having pondered the question over a long sip of lager. "You do it every time we work together."

Eames took a few slow bites of his curried chicken before he spoke again. "Because, believe it or not, Arthur, you're a very good-looking man and I fancy you." His tone of voice was flippant, but the look on his face was utterly serious, with an intensity that was oddly touching.

"I'm flattered, I really am," Arthur said after a few minutes of silence, looking down at the scraps left on his plate. "It's not that I'm not attracted to you or that I've never been attracted to men, but –"

"But?" Eames said, before he could continue.

"I don't sleep with anyone I work with," Arthur said, firmly, with all the authority he could muster, which was a lot. "It complicates things."

Eames nodded then, once, his eyes hooded, a sort of understanding in his face, and something else that Arthur wasn't entirely sure of.

"You don't have to worry about getting drunk in front of me," he said after a sip of iced water. "I wouldn't take advantage of you like that." Eames smiled wryly, but the expression faded into seriousness. "Really. I'm not offended. You said no, and I'll respect it."

"Thank you," Arthur said.

 

"You know, I was wrong about this," Eames said a short time afterwards, the words slow and thoughtful. They had left the restaurant and were now sitting on a bench by the riverside watching the neon light dance off the water.

"What about?" Arthur reached up and loosened the knot of his necktie very slightly, and then undid the button on his shirt collar. A stiff breeze came off the water's surface then, and his eyes stung with something that could have been dryness or fatigue.

"That this job would be like the old days. It isn't the same. Not even almost." Eames was sprawled almost full-length on his half of the park bench, his legs stretched out in front of him, as if at rest.

"No. No it isn't." Arthur stood up and crossed the short distance to the riverside, leaning heavily on the railing as he watched the tourist boats go by. The wind felt surprisingly good in all its intensity, the tortured heat of the day dissipating at last. The pavement was still radiating warmth back up at him as though the ground could not forget the sun's fever. "It hasn't been the same since Cobb retired."

"I suppose we should be happy for him," Eames ventured. The bench creaked softly beneath him as he got up to join Arthur at the railing.

"I should, but it just isn't the same without him doing all the things he told me not to." Arthur couldn't help smiling ruefully when he said that. It was funny how much he missed what had formerly driven him nearly mad with frustration.

"You sound almost as though he jilted you at the altar."

"Our relationship isn't like _that,_" Arthur said, stifling a low chuckle at the absurd mental image that popped into his head, of Cobb as a runaway bride. "Dom's just my best and oldest friend, and now that he's moved on I'm not sure what I'm going to do."

"Time to make some new friends, maybe." Eames caught Arthur's eye, his gaze uncharacteristically frank and open. They stood staring at the river for a few seconds after the moment evaporated. "I think we should head back to the hotel," Eames said after that companionable silence. "I have to be at work early tomorrow."

 

Housekeeping had been in during the time Arthur was gone, and the room had been tidied, the sheets changed. Something glinted faintly from the dark wood of the desk in his room, and as he got closer to investigate he realized what it was. The chambermaid had found the fifty-cent coin Eames had left behind on the bed after the failed coin-bounce that morning and left it on the desk where he could find it. Arthur smiled quietly to himself as he picked it up and then flipped it, catching it on the back of his hand. The embossed crest of the country's seal glimmered faintly against his flesh as the coin came up heads. He flipped it into the air again, catching it this time without looking, and then put it down on the dresser with a wry smile.

Arthur crawled into bed after a quick, tepid shower. The moisture still in his hair soaked into the pillowcase as he lay down but he was beyond caring; the cool water had done nothing to combat the jet lag he was still struggling with, and that in combination with the intense concentration of the day's planning had left his brain feeling weak and rubbery, as though it had done a ten-mile run. Sleep evaded him for a time, as usual, but the exhaustion and jet lag left him with a strange, pleasant sense of drifting similar to the one he sometimes felt if he had been swimming laps before bedtime.

He lay awake for two and a half hours before he actually dozed off this time, his sleep full of blood and burnt gunpowder and yellow crime scene tape, imagined camera flashes blooming behind his eyes like summer lightning storms. He twitched awake with a gasp at the memory of a sob on the phone and a pop on the other end like a bottle rocket. He had this dream once every few months and even his training as a lucid dreamer did not help him with the blend of grief and horrified fascination that held him in the psychic prop wash of those memories. Unlike Cobb he could still dream unassisted, but the times the nightmare recurred made him envy Dom for the blankness of his sleep. It took him more than two hours to fall asleep again, his mind uneasy and fearful of the other phantoms lurking in his subconscious.


	2. Chapter 2

Despite the poor sleep and bad dreams Arthur woke up the next morning half an hour late and feeling more rested than he had been the week before. He had just stepped out of the shower and had been buttoning his shirt up when he heard a sharp rap at the door. He took the time to finish putting his shoes on and then glanced out the peephole to find Eames waiting in the hallway outside.

"Your bed isn't made," Eames said, when Arthur let him in. "Poor night?" He was wearing one of the new suits he had bought yesterday, a Dunhill in a very nice charcoal pinstripe. He had left his shirt collar open, and the knot on his necktie was crooked. The silk had been patterned with what Arthur had taken for polka dots at first, but on closer examination the dots had turned out to be tiny damask roses flecking the creamy fabric in a subdued display of flamboyance.

"No, I'm fine. I was going to take care of that next," Arthur said as he turned away, fighting the urge to step up to Eames and straighten his necktie. He pulled the top sheet tightly over the mattress, smoothing the wrinkles out and folding the corners of the sheet at a forty-five degree angle to make perfect hospital corners. He did the same for the blanket before tucking both in between the mattress and the bed frame.

"Have you ever thought of getting checked for obsessive-compulsive disorder?" Eames asked, his hands in his pockets as Arthur picked up the pillow he had slept on last night and shook the wrinkles out of it in quick, precise movements. He pondered flinging it at Eames for a second, before putting it back on top of the blanket, tucking the excess pillowcase beneath it.

"That suit fits all wrong on you, you know," Arthur said, ignoring his previous comment as he straightened the second pillow out and laid the comforter on top of the freshly made bed. "There isn't enough easement across the back and shoulders. That's where all these wrinkles are coming from. And the sleeves are too tight across your upper arms." He tugged gently at a wrinkle on the comforter to emphasize his point, smoothing it out.

"Pity. There's a very good bespoke tailors' down at the Raffles Hotel, but their waiting list is absolutely ridiculous." Eames said, turning his head to follow Arthur's gesture. "And I have to be at work in half an hour." He made no move to sit down today, lingering instead by the door.

"You wouldn't want to be late for your first morning on the job," Arthur said. He went to the wardrobe and picked out a tie for himself, draping the dark-blue silk around his neck like a stole. He watched Eames' reflection in the mirror on the dresser before him as he started to knot his own necktie.

"Do you want me to drive you to the offices before I go?" Eames had a hand on the door handle, ready to leave. He pulled the keys to the Benz out of his pocket with a soft jingle.

"No. I was thinking of walking today. I want to see the city." Arthur's fingers moved expertly, looping his necktie into the familiar half-Windsor knot that he favored from time to time. He pulled the broad end of the tie across, around and over, and then around and over again, tucking it through the loop with a rasp of silk more felt than heard as he slid the knot up against his throat.

"I'll see you later, then," Eames said before the door swung shut behind him.

Arthur contemplated calling for a room service breakfast for a moment before he discarded the idea and put on his suit jacket. Almost as an afterthought he scooped up the fifty-cent coin that Eames had left and put it in his pocket before he left.

 

The sun was in the process of rising fully when Arthur came out of the hotel lobby and the air outside was still as cool and pleasant as it could get for the tropics. The urban landscape around him obeyed, for the most part, the well-worn aesthetics of the International Style with occasional hints of postmodern and late modern architecture. He took his time walking to the offices, watching as the glass windows caught the early-morning sunlight, making the buildings look as though they had been dipped in liquid gold.

His phone buzzed furiously in his pocket as he crossed a busy street on the way to the shopping complex the office tower was situated in. He pulled it out of his pocket as he stepped onto the curb and flipped it open to answer.

"Arthur."

"This is Janine Lee." The phone seemed to strip some of the smokiness out of her voice. "I wanted to know if you needed me to pick you up at the Mandarin today. I'll be bringing some equipment over to the offices so it won't be out of my way."

"Actually I'm already heading there," Arthur said. "I decided to walk today."

"I'll meet you later, then," she said, and then a dial tone hummed in his ear as she hung up. He put the phone back in his pocket and then continued taking his time on the walk, taking in the landscape around him as he did. There was a lot more greenery in the middle of the city than he had expected; the urban planners here seemed fond of putting down tree cover to mitigate the ridiculous heat of midday. He stopped at the Starbucks on the way to the elevator lobby of the office building and bought himself a bagel and a cup of coffee, and then, on a whim, took the escalator downstairs into the basement levels of the shopping mall.

The basement itself seemed to contain restaurants for the most part, the corridor ringing a sunken center plaza containing an enormous fountain that had been built according to the nebulous principles of feng shui. Arthur wasn't sure if he found the fountain tacky, droll or a little bit of both, but the running water was nice to look at while he had his breakfast.

Lee was already hard at work when he showed up at the offices; plastic wrap rustled underfoot as he shut the door behind him, and boxes crowded the lawn chairs in the reception area.

"Good morning," he heard her call from what had once been the office pantry. Curious, he stuck his head in to find her setting an electric coffee maker on the counter. "I didn't think it was fair to make anyone work without caffeine," she said.

"Thanks. Did you bring all this stuff up here yourself?

Lee shrugged. "It wasn't that bad. I had a trolley and boxes don't flop around like the human body does." The tone of her voice invited no further comment, and Arthur decided this time that discretion was the better part of valor. "Before you go," she said, as he backed out of the pantry, "I left a couple boxes in your office for you. It's stuff I thought you and Mr. Eames might need."

Arthur found the boxes on the floor of his makeshift studio in the conference room. One of them had been pressed into duty as a temporary in-tray and contained some of the information that had started to trickle in from their informants. The other was completely unmarked. It had been taped shut with packing tape, and he had to slit it open with one of the X-acto knives he used for layout work. Its weight and heft was familiar to him before he had even pulled the top flaps open, however, and he wasn't really surprised to have found a PASIV unit in the box. It even came with the usual single-use alcohol swabs, cotton balls and spare IV lines that marked it as brand new.

He pulled it out and laid it over the Strathmore drawing pad that he had used for his preliminary sketches and then pulled the Styrofoam padding sandwiching the device off. The foam blocks landed on the floor, where they squeaked softly against the legs of the desk. He pushed gently on the case lock and popped the case open to reveal the mechanisms within. A quick status check showed that everything was working as intended, although he still lacked the vials of somnacin that the PASIV was supposed to administer in the first place. Satisfied with its condition, he shut the case top and then laid it gently on the floor beside his desk. The packing material went into the box the PASIV had arrived in, and he took the box itself out into the reception area so it wouldn't clutter up his workspace.

Lee was sitting cross-legged in the middle of a blank spot on the carpet surrounded entirely by crumpled cardboard and discarded packing material. She swore quietly to herself in what sounded like several different languages as she leafed through a flimsy manual. Two screwdrivers, an Allen key and parts of what looked like flat-packed furniture were laid out in front of her.

"Do you need help with that?" Arthur asked, careful not to trip over any furniture pieces that he might have missed.

"Not with this. The manual's just written by idiots who seem to speak something kind of like English, but not quite. Teach me to buy Ikea knockoffs from the Carrefour downstairs."

Something crunched very softly under the sole of Arthur's loafer as he dumped the box in the pile of cardboard building up near the office door. He lifted his foot to find a flimsy plastic bag filled with small metal washers. "I think you dropped this," he said, nudging it over to her with his toe.

"Thanks." She did not take her eyes off the manual, and he left her to her work.

 

Arthur sat back down at his work desk and started in on the box of folders. He started with the one on the top of the pile, calmly leafing through the photocopied reports and adding his own comments in the margins. According to the first one he read, Sophia Francis Hanamura was an Australian citizen who had met her now-estranged husband at a work-related cocktail party; they had a seven-year-old daughter named Ichigo who, according to the dossier, was currently in hospital for cancer. Arthur marked the page, put the folder down on his desk, and then went through the box for another. Ichigo's dossier was thicker than her mother's, padded out with photocopied medical reports. The latest entry noted that her condition was now terminal, and that Saito's investigators expected her to go into hospice care soon. He made a note of that in his Moleskine notebook and then hauled himself out of his chair, intending to put some coffee on.

Outside in the reception area Lee had finished putting the table together and was now clearing up the mess on the floor, flattening cardboard boxes and wadding plastic wrap up into fist-size crinkly balls. Arthur got the coffee started, and then went in to join her.

"Do you have everything you need?" she asked as he sat down in one of the lawn chairs with Ichigo's dossier in his hand. She was folding up one of the flattened cardboard boxes before she stuffed it in the one she was using as a makeshift waste bin.

"The PASIV looks good but I'm short the somnacin," he said, opening the folder and looking at its depressing contents again.

"I'm supposed to make the pickup later this week." Her dark eyes flicked up to the cover of the manila folder as she registered the name written on it in black marker. "Poor kid. Pancreatoblastoma's usually treatable if caught early, but she's way past that."

"The report said she had tumors in her brain."

"Yeah, well, that was pancreatic cancer that had metastasized. Pathology results are in there somewhere."

"You seem to know a lot about this."

"I used to be a registered nurse anesthetist before I switched jobs. Still have my qualifications."

What she had told Eames the first night he was here started to make sense. "So when you said you were going to relieve a day shift nurse, you were actually going off to moonlight."

"I wouldn't call it moonlighting. My husband's been sick for the past three years. He needs twenty-four hour nursing care."

"I'm sorry," Arthur said, biting down on his lip in a mixture of sympathy and embarrassment.

"It's all right," she shrugged. Something about her voice and body language suggested that it was not, in fact, all right, but Arthur decided not to press her further. It was only after he had sat down at his desk that he realized that he had forgotten to actually pour himself a cup of coffee on the way back.

 

Lee left the offices at eleven this time, leaving Arthur to go through folders that she had left by his desk. The ill-informed tended to think that careers in intelligence consisted of the exploits of British spies in evening dress; those who knew enough to know what extraction was tended to assume it was similar, except with more shooting and less overt legality. Real life had no obligation to stay that interesting, however, and usually Arthur spent most of the time leading up to an extraction sifting through the minutiae of a subject's life. The guns only came out if something had gone horribly, terribly wrong along the way, and nobody in their sane mind wanted that to happen.

 

This job turned out to be no different from most of the others he had done. Several days passed without much fanfare. Eames continued working his dummy position in middle management while Lee and Arthur tailed Hanamura discreetly, trading shifts unpredictably so as not to alert him. The folders started to pile up on Arthur's desk and the walls of the conference room started to look as though he had shingled them in grainy photocopies patchworked with sticky-backed notes. The real challenge then, was in sifting out the potential leads that he could exploit buried in all this data.

Arthur read through the minor secrets of Hanamura's life with a cool, dispassionate eye. He had done this so long that his going through others' peccadilloes no longer filled him with a vague sense of embarrassment. Instead he felt a sort of professional detachment as he read through these dossiers, mentally going over the subject's friendships and relationships. The one thing being in the intelligence and extraction business had really taught him was that nobody was perfect, and that everyone was, to a greater or lesser degree, just as messed-up as everyone else.

He had been poring over the folders for nearly an hour today when he heard the card-lock on the office door beep. He stood up on slightly stiff knees and looked out his workroom door to find Eames standing in the doorway with a supermarket plastic bag in his hand.

"I thought I'd find you here," he said, walking down the hallway to join Arthur in the conference room.

"What are you doing here? Aren't you supposed to be at work?" Arthur asked, as he sat back down in his chair.

"It's my lunch hour," Eames said. He stopped and glanced at the notes pinned up all over the walls, his eyes pausing over the picture of Hanamura's wife. "Not a bad-looking woman. Pity about the marriage, eh?" He dropped the plastic bag on Arthur's desk and then pulled up a spare chair.

"What's that?" Arthur asked, pushing the bag and its contents off the dossier that he had been reading. The plastic was wet with condensation and clung to what looked like a couple canned drinks within the bag. Stray drops of moisture soaked into the dossier on the desk, and Arthur put it away before anything else could happen to it.

"Lunch. I hope you like supermarket sushi." Eames pulled a pair of crackling plastic clamshell containers from the bag, both containing several pieces of sushi. Two cans of green tea followed. He then upended the bag and shook the paper napkins, disposable chopsticks and soy sauce packets onto the desk.

"Sushi's good, thanks," Arthur said, snapping his chopsticks apart. No matter how he did it he could never get them to split perfectly.

"Good. I was worried this wasn't posh enough for you." Eames eschewed the disposable chopsticks and chose to eat his sushi with his hands.

"I'm not posh," he said, picking up a piece of tobiko sushi. The flying fish roe crunched in his teeth and popped on his tongue with a subtly smoky flavor. Eames' only response was a low laugh, one that he stifled with a bite of roasted eel and vinegared rice. Arthur decided not to take the bait and instead picked up another piece of sushi with his mismatched chopsticks.

"How is the data?" Eames asked, as he stood up from his chair with his tray of sushi in his hand, looking again at the notes Arthur had put up.

"Frustrating." Arthur said after a sip of green tea. "Lee is very thorough and I'm sure we haven't missed anything, but I still can't figure out how Hanamura was compromised."

"Something about that bothers me, too." Eames said, thoughtfully.

"What do you mean?"

"In my experience, guilt shows. You have to be a very good actor to hide it, because it distorts your thoughts like a star's gravity well. Even if you can't see it, it affects what you think and what you do. I've had drinks with the bloke. Hanamura is not acting like a guilty man." Eames paused and went back to Arthur's desk for his can of green tea.

"I've gone over all his family members, and the only one who might have any kind of motive to betray him is his wife, whom he hasn't spoken to in nearly a year." Arthur said, glancing at the notes on the wall. His eyes returned to the photocopies of Ichigo's medical reports. Arthur had written notes in the margin about how Hanamura still visited her every day, right after work. "The only person he spends much time talking to is the dying seven-year-old who is currently in a pediatric cancer ward, and I'm not sure she would know anything at all."

A frown creased Eames' forehead as he ran his finger down the sheet that detailed Hanamura's daily visits to his dying daughter. He thought for a long moment, put his tray of sushi down on the table and reached for his own cellphone.

"What are you doing?" Arthur asked, as Eames speed-dialed someone.

"Working on a hunch," he said, as he waited for the other person to pick up. "Janine? Love? It's me, Eames. About Hanamura's daughter – is there any way you can get access to the security footage from the hospital security cameras? I want to see if she's had unauthorized visits."

_"Love?"_ Arthur asked after he had hung up.

"Figure of speech. Not that I'd mind –"

"She's a married woman – never mind. Like that would stop you. What was that hunch you had?"

"I'll tell you after we have a look at the footage. This may just be nothing."

 

Arthur had just finished his sushi when Lee came back to the office holding a small paper-wrapped package which she handed over to Arthur. He slit it open to find a box holding several unmarked vials of somnacin.

"This stuff's the exact grade and concentration the US military uses. I made sure my chemist didn't cut it with any additives or diluents. Tell me if you need anything else," she said before she stole the last piece of sushi off of Eames' tray. "As for the security footage, I've got someone working on it but I may not be able to get it before this evening."

"That's fine," Eames said. "You do owe me dinner now, though."

"I have no idea what kind of exchange system you're working off of, Mr. Eames, but one piece of hamachi does not translate to dinner for three."

"It doesn't _strictly_ have to be dinner for three," Eames said with a wicked grin. "It's not like Arthur even knows what a social life is any more."

"I resent that statement," Arthur said. He glanced at the vials of somnacin, wondering what Lee's comment about the US military meant and how much Saito had dug up about his own background. He wasn't too worried about how much Saito knew, however. The most vital parts of his resume were so densely classified that he doubted that the Secretary of State had full access to them.

"Fine," Lee said after a moment, struggling to keep her facial expression stern. "I'll take you both out for dinner tonight if it's what it takes to make you stop complaining about a single piece of sushi."

"Very well," Eames said, glancing at his watch as he stood. It was the same antique that he had worn since Arthur had first met him years ago. "I have to get back to middle management for now, but I will see you both back here some time after five."

Lee watched him exit the office with a look on her face that was amusement and exasperation combined. "You've probably known him longer than I have," she said to Arthur after the door shut behind Eames. "Is he always this smug?"

"Sometimes he's worse," Arthur said before he took another sip of his green tea.

 

Arthur cleared his desk of folders and lifted the PASIV device onto it, and then went into the office pantry and washed his hands. Back at his desk he started preparing to load the PASIV with the vials of somnacin Lee had dropped off at his desk just a short while ago. She took the seat that Eames had recently vacated and her eyes followed his swift, practiced movements with some familiarity.

"Eames told me that he had met you once while working in Hong Kong," Arthur said as he unlocked the briefcase shell. The spring-loaded lid popped open a few inches after he depressed the latches flanking the handle, revealing the innards of the machine.

She smiled sadly at that. "That was a long time ago, before I quit."

"If you don't mind me asking, why did you quit?" Arthur knew that most extractors didn't just quit without a valid reason for doing so. The dreamstate was so exhilarating and engaging that one eventually had to walk a razor's edge between the rising therapeutic dosages of somnacin and the addiction that meant a lifetime of sterile, dreamless sleep – sleep that was bleached-out and barren of memory without the drugs and the PASIV.

"I'm not sure that's a story I want to tell right now," she said. "Suffice it to say that someone I cared very much about chose to go somewhere I could not follow, not even in dreams." She got up from the office chair and shook her head slowly as though leaving a reverie. Arthur continued loading the PASIV in silence, pushing the vials into the cradles one by one. "I'll leave you to your work," she said after a while. "I'll be back after five." The office door beeped once, and then clicked shut, the bolt in the lock sliding home as the card-lock worked itself automatically.

 

Arthur spent the rest of the day going through the stack of dossiers that Lee had left on his desk. Fragments of words swarmed behind his eyelids when he closed his eyes for a few moments of rest, the afterimages part of the infamous Tetris effect. He glanced at his watch; it was half-past-four, which gave him enough time to make sure all the facts were committed to memory.

He undid the cuff of his left sleeve, rolling it up two inches. He always wore his watchband a little loose so he could slide it up his wrist without having to remove it altogether. He set the timer for ten minutes and adjusted the dosage of somnacin for his body weight, pulled the IV infusion line from its spool and then pulled it out of the open PASIV unit through the little brass coupling. He swabbed the skin of his wrist with one of the single-use alcohol swabs and then squeezed the cannula and slid the fine 30-gauge needles into a vein, securing them in place with the tether on the end of the IV line.

He had been doing this for so long that the experience should have been routine for now, but the panic always fluttered in his chest and belly, as though in anticipation or warning of the drugged sleep and the dreams that came with it. He took a deep breath, leaned back in his office chair, and then pushed down on the trigger in the PASIV. Sleep hit him then, hard and dense like a sandbag between the eyes, and he let it drag him under without any resistance.

He went to the place he normally went to when he was alone and dreaming like this, a fictional analogy of the Federal-style house he had grown up in, in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. Miles and Dom had always warned him to never use his own memories for dream-constructs, but their warnings were ultimately superfluous in this case; no dream-building could ever be as oppressive as his real childhood home had been, and he had no wish to visit that particular house in any event. He had left behind his family and his name years ago, but he kept certain details of the place alive in his memories and used it to organize the many facts that he needed to know for the work he did. It was a brilliant autumn outside; it always was in this place in his head, and as he turned the key in the lock he could smell the spicy rot of fallen leaves wet from a recent rain.

His own projections haunted the hallways of this notional house like ghosts, but his parents were never in the places that he chose to visit. It was just as well. He had not spoken to them in over ten years, and he did not wish to even now. He went upstairs to his own bedroom, studiously avoiding the rooms he had set aside to serve as his father's study and the master bedroom. Those places were off-limits to him even in his own dreams.

"Hey, Derek," someone whispered to him as he passed the halls with facts and memories encoded in the dry whisper of fingers against old wallpaper. He did not have to look to know who it was, and he stepped into his room without looking back at the hallway.

"I'm sorry. I can't stay today," he said. "Work."

"That would be it," the ghost whispered back to him. "You know where to find me."

"Always," he said, not looking back. Sometimes his subconscious liked to haunt him in a manner that reminded him of the myth of Orpheus.

The polished wood flooring in his bedroom looked scuffed, marked with years' worth of scratches under an old-fashioned rag rug. Arthur knew that there was a loose floorboard under the rag rug that was identical to the one in the room he had left behind in Old Greenwich. In the real world the loose floorboard did not exist, but he had always wanted a hiding place like that, so he made one when he dreamed up this place. He crossed over to the bookshelves and pulled out a ring binder, the rightmost one in a shelf full of them. He then lay down on his old bed, fully dressed, and flipped through the binder idly, making annotations in the pages with a fountain pen that he had pulled out of a shirt pocket.

He had read about the method of loci in college, but had never quite understood the mnemonic technique until when Miles had taken him under his wing in the period of time when the US military had trained him to use the old prototypes that had predated the PASIV for interrogation and intelligence gathering. Afterwards he had found the old memory palaces elegant and soon took to attaching facts and figures to the sensory details of his childhood home for quick and reliable retrieval. The concrete, lucid dreams made possible by somnacin made this process faster and easier, but even when awake and under stress he could close his eyes for a second and walk himself mentally to the place in his head where the facts had been stored.

This was one of the things that made him such a good point man and a world-class extractor, and before that, a real asset in the field of military and civilian intelligence. Currently he was adding to the notes from the Hanamura job in the blank pages in the binder; the act of writing was another association that he could combine the data with for better recall. He had been going over the data for about forty subjective minutes when he heard a step creak on the staircase, a telltale that someone had joined him in this dream. The projections in his head always walked as though on eggshells.  
The footsteps got louder and clearer, and Arthur put the ring binder down, got up from his bed and reached for the Glock 17 he wore in a holster behind his right hip, ready to eject any would-be intruders from his mind if need be.

"God, Arthur," a familiar voice said, as someone crossed the threshold of his old bedroom. "Even the inside of your head is posh."

"Eames?" Arthur holstered the Glock and then crossed his arms over his chest. He felt an odd, giddy mix of anger and exhilaration filling him; even when others trained in his dreams he did not permit them in this private, personal space, but for some reason Eames' presence here did not feel wrong. "What are you doing here?"

"I left work early to beat rush-hour traffic, and I thought we should have a talk someplace private."

"This probably isn't the right place for it," Arthur said, his eyes narrowing. "For all I know, you could be anyone wearing that face."

"Alert as ever, but it really is me." Eames said, his smile infuriating as he knelt down to push the rug aside. "What's in there, eh? Your collection of stroke-mags?" If there had been any doubt at all in Arthur's mind that this was the real Eames in his dream, it had evaporated with that one characteristically risqué observation.

"I do not keep porn in my _dreams._" Arthur said.

"No, and if you did you wouldn't keep it crammed under a loose floorboard. You probably alphabetize your pornography collection and categorize it by subject matter." Eames tapped a finger gently against the floor, listening to it echo hollowly at his touch.

"We are not continuing this conversation," Arthur said before he shot Eames in the face, and then turned the gun on himself. Before he shot himself he saw someone looking in at him from the doorway, green eyes dulled with blood and bruise. "I'll be back," he said, and then he pulled the trigger.

He twitched awake in the office chair, glaring hard at Eames, who at that moment had been rubbing reflexively at his brow with his right hand.

"Judging from your reaction, Arthur, I believe it is safe to infer that that were in fact pornography under that board."

"Eames." Arthur shot him a look full of daggers and hate as he pulled the needles out of his wrist. "What did you want to talk to me about?" He pressed hard on the pinprick on the inside of his wrist with a cotton swab until the bleeding stopped.

"Let's go out for a minute," Eames said, getting up from his chair. "I don't know how you can stand being in an office all day." He had already pulled himself free from the IV line, and a pair of tiny bloodstains marred the whiteness of his shirt cuff.

 

They went down to the basement levels in the shopping complex where the constant susurration of the fountain's jets made eavesdropping difficult.

"Is this about Lee? Do you think she's working for someone else?" Arthur asked, taking a moment to lean against the wet railing surrounding the fountain itself. There were signs instructing tourists to walk a circuit around it for good luck.

"No. I know her well enough to know that once she's bought she'll stay loyal and Saito knows better than to screw either of us over. No, it's just that what I wanted to talk about is a little privileged, if you know what I mean."

Arthur nodded, once, waiting for Eames to speak again. A stray breeze sent droplets of fountain water drizzling onto the both of them, where they hung, sparkling, on the nap of Eames' suit jacket before they started to soak into the fabric.

"I once worked an extraction where the target had been militarized. I got my arse quite thoroughly kicked by his projections, and we were going to call it and quit when I tried something a little… ethically dubious, as it were."

Arthur raised an eyebrow at that. "More ethically dubious than what we do on a regular basis?"

"Much. As it turned out, he had spent a lot of time talking to his comatose missus in the hospital. I bought one of the nurses, disguised myself as an orderly and performed the extraction." Eames looked down at his own hands as though embarrassed by what he had just said. Arthur knew better. If Eames had been bothered by anything in that confession it had been by his having to admit that someone had once gotten the better of him in the first place.

"How did you even know if she knew anything worth knowing?" Arthur asked as they finished their circuit of the fountain. He didn't quite believe in feng shui, but at this point he would take any luck they could get.

"Well, I reckoned that even if she couldn't access the memories of their conversations they were still in there somewhere, and even if she couldn't access them I could."

That was starting to make sense to Arthur. One could say in the simplest terms that extractors were specially trained to remember the contents of the dreams they invaded, but the truth was that everyone remembered their dreams in similar detail. What the layman was not trained to do was access the contents of that dream from memory.

"So what you were getting at with the hospital surveillance footage is that someone could have performed an extraction on the little girl."

"I don't know how much Hanamura told her, but he could have told her enough. That job I worked, he told her no specifics but it was enough for us to confirm what he was getting up to, and that's all we needed."

"That's something else that worries me," Arthur said, fighting a slight shiver as he crossed from the wet, humid air outside to the pleasantly frigid air-conditioning in the shopping levels. "Cobb and I pissed off some rather powerful people before we took the Fischer job."

"Cobol Engineering." Eames put his hands in his pockets as they walked back towards the restaurants in the basement level.

"You know," Arthur said, glancing in his direction. It was not a question.

"I helped Cobb lose his tail in Mombasa. Apparently, Mr. Saito really does know how to wield a car door."

Arthur nodded quietly to himself. Cobb had told him about the ridiculous price on their heads after he had come back from Mombasa. He would have felt flattered if he had been the kind of man to feel such, but the news had only left him feeling more paranoid than usual. "If this was a straightforward case of corporate espionage then whoever has compromised Hanamura would have used this information already, and we'd pretty much be out of a job," he said. "Either they're trying to force Saito to show his hand, or I'm being baited."

"Well, they picked the wrong city to do this in," Eames said lightly as he walked by a small frozen yoghurt stand, his pace slowing as he read the menu and then glanced at the cute girl behind the counter. "No guns, and they have to tread lightly."

"In either case we would probably do a better job treading lightly than their usual brand of thug." Arthur said as he slowed to a stop beside Eames. He didn't have much of a sweet tooth himself, but the frozen yoghurt did sound appealing, especially in this tropical heat. "What the hell," he said half to himself as he crossed over to the counter.

"Don't blame me if you can't finish your dinner later," Eames said with a slow smile.

 

Eames was propped up in one of the lawn chairs, halfway through finishing the small cup of mango-flavored frozen yoghurt that he had bought downstairs when Lee showed up at the offices to pick them up for dinner. Arthur had devoured his own share of the yoghurt during the elevator ride upstairs, earning him an ice-cream headache for his troubles.

"What is this?" she asked, pinning Eames with a stare that convinced Arthur, once and for all, that she had been telling the truth about her former career as a nurse. "Did you two already get dinner?"

"No. Just dessert." Eames licked the last of the yoghurt off his spoon with the pink tip of his tongue in a gesture that was oddly feline in its economy.

"You let him do that?" she asked, turning her razored stare to Arthur before she gave him the large manila envelope that she had been holding in her hand.

"I'm not his mother, nor would I ever wish to be," Arthur said as he unwound the string holding the envelope shut. In it was a pair of DVDs in unmarked plastic cases, presumably containing the surveillance videos that Eames had asked for around lunchtime.

"I'd eat all my vegetables if you were my mummy," Eames said, his commented directed at either or both of them. He smiled a salacious grin as he looked around for a place to throw the empty paper cup.

"Dear God. Freud would have a field day with you," Lee said, rubbing at her forehead with her hands.

"Only if he brings the good cigars. I've no patience for the subpar stuff," Eames said, his expression smug.

"Do you still want to go get dinner?" Lee asked, glancing in Arthur's direction. She was jingling the keys to the Audi impatiently in her hand.

"If you two want to, go ahead," Arthur said. He popped open the jewel case on the first DVD and fed the disc into his laptop's disc drive. "I want to confirm Eames' suspicions. I can go eat something after you get back."

"We could bring something back," Eames offered. "You're not a picky eater, are you?"

"Whatever you bring back probably isn't ever going to be as bad as the black bean burrito MRE," Arthur said, opening the folders on DVD. Someone had, rather helpfully, categorized the videos by date and time, breaking them down into weeks and days.

"We'll be back with dinner," Lee said, as Eames preceded her out of the office.

 

Arthur had spent over an hour fast-forwarding his way through grainy surveillance video, working his way backwards from the date of his arrival, when Eames returned to the office with a delicious-smelling plastic bag in his hand.

"We had Korean barbeque for dinner. I hope that's all right with you," he said, depositing the bag onto Arthur's desk. A fragrant puff of steam drifted out of the bag as he pulled out a polystyrene container and cup, along with some disposable cutlery.

"That's fine, thanks." Arthur said absently, reaching for the cup of coffee to his left, only to find that it had gone cold while he had been staring at the monitor of his laptop. He frowned and put the cup back down. "Where's Lee?" he asked.

"She let me out right by the shopping concourse and I took the lifts up. She said she had some errands to take care of. Have you found anything yet?"

"Not yet," Arthur said, pausing the video player and rubbing at his eyes, which felt as though he had rubbed sand into them. The grainy video had been less than pleasant to watch, let alone scrutinize closely. He found himself wishing that he had brought his glasses with him today; he was just nearsighted enough that the surveillance videos gave him a slight headache.

"I'll take over while you eat," Eames said as Arthur stood up and stretched, working the kinks and tension out of the muscles in his neck and shoulders. He rocked his head from side to side, and then stopped halfway through the movement when he realized that Eames was waiting for him to get out of the way so he could sit down at the desk. It was only after he had edged around the desk that he realized that Eames had also been watching him stretch, and he wasn't actually sure that he disliked the attention at all.

Arthur grabbed the office chair that Eames usually took and positioned himself on the other side of his desk so he could eat his dinner. The polystyrene container held a fluffy mound of rice half-buried in what looked like shreds of grilled chicken stained red by some kind of spicy-smelling marinade, tossed in shreds of lettuce, onion and whole bean sprouts. The disposable cup contained some miso soup, and a there was a small wedge of watermelon in a plastic bag resting on the bottom of the carrier bag itself. He found himself letting out a sigh of weariness as he took a long sip of the soup; he was, at this point, fairly tired and hungry, and he still had a ridiculous amount of video to go through. This was par for the course with most extraction jobs, however. The extraction itself could take less than half an hour, but the planning itself usually took weeks, if not months of careful research, rehearsals and organization.

He was halfway through his dinner when Eames made a small sound, just under his breath. "What?" Arthur asked, putting his spoon down. His nose had started to run from the heat of his dinner, and he swiped at his face with a paper napkin.

"I think I may have something," Eames said, turning the laptop around on the desk so Arthur could look at the monitor without having to switch sides.

The video lacked resolution, but what that particular clip showed was a blurry figure walking briskly down the hallway leading to Ichigo's room with what looked like a briefcase in his hand – one that could have easily been a PASIV device. Dinner forgotten, Arthur leaned heavily on the desk, staring closely at the monitor of his laptop. He paused the video, rewound it and then watched the scene again with a frown. "I think I've seen him somewhere before," he said, letting the scene play out to its end. After the first figure had exited the camera's range two others followed, heading in the same direction that he had.

"We might have to get that video enhanced if you actually want to find out who that fellow is," Eames said. He had gotten up from his chair and was standing next to Arthur, his shoulder close enough to Arthur's that he would have objected if his attention were not wholly taken up by the ghostly figure in the video.

"I can't say for sure, but – I think I know that walk," Arthur said, as he watched the snatch of video again. He rewound it and then watched it another half a dozen times. A knot of dread started to twist painfully in his gut. "That's Nash," he said, abruptly aware that his voice had dropped to a whisper. He felt suddenly cold, as though his skin had flash-frozen, and he groped after the cup of soup, desperate for some kind of warmth to thaw the sour fear in his belly.

"I've heard of him. Architect for hire, isn't he?" Eames' shoulder brushed against Arthur's with a soft rasping of cloth as he leaned in for a better look at the fuzzy freeze-frame on the laptop monitor. Normally Arthur would have minded that closeness but a 13-inch monitor wasn't exactly suited to multiple viewers.

"Nash was the architect on the Cobol job we did prior to the Fischer inception. Not a bad extractor either. He's not anywhere in Cobb's league, but there aren't many people in Cobb's league. We worked with him a few times before that and we kept him on for the extraction that Cobol wanted us to perform on Saito. I didn't like him. He got careless at times." Arthur explained as he sat down and returned to his cooling dinner. He fished the tender shreds of chicken out and ate them one by one, but decided not to bother with the soggy, lukewarm lettuce. "When things didn't quite work out with Saito or Cobol he tried to sell us out to Saito in exchange for protection."

"Unfortunately for him, Saito wanted Cobb to work for him, and that, I assume, was where I entered the picture." Eames reached over for the chair he had been sitting in before and dragged it over to Arthur's side of the desk.

"He knew who to look for," Arthur said. "The extraction he let us attempt on him was an audition for the Fischer job." The plastic bag rustled as he fished out the wedge of watermelon. Its cool sweetness was the perfect antidote to the vicious bite of the Korean chili sauce. A trickle of thin juice ran down his chin, and he wiped it off with his left hand before it could land on his shirt or tie.

"What happened to him after that?"

"Saito offered to let Cobb kill Nash for the betrayal, but that's not how Cobb does things. We left him behind in Tokyo for Cobol's people. I guess they decided to let him live." He finished the wedge of watermelon in three large bites and then threw the rind in the container that had held his dinner.

"In exchange for your head?"

"That remains to be seen, but I doubt his involvement in this job is any kind of a coincidence." Arthur reached into his jacket pocket for his cellphone and punched in a number from memory. "I'm going to make a quick call to Tokyo. Saito needs to know about this."

 

There was a short delay before the ringtone came on courtesy of international direct dialing, and it took three rings before someone picked up on the other end.

"Mr. Saito, this is Arthur," he said without further greeting. He glanced out the window blinds at the darkening sky outside. Tokyo was an hour ahead of Singapore and he knew from the research for the failed extraction that Saito hated being interrupted during dinner. "I know this probably isn't that good a time for you."

"You know enough about me, Mr. Arthur, that if you were to call me at an hour like this" Saito said over the long-distance connection, "it would have to be about something of vital importance." There was a soft but distinct clink of glassware audible through the phone.

"It is," Arthur said, turning around in his office chair. "I know how Hanamura has been compromised."

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. "Do tell," Saito said at last. "Or would that be something better mentioned in your report to me afterwards?"

"This is not a matter of betrayal; I think Cobol is behind this."

"That would make sense. My recent acquisitions and the dissolution of Fischer-Morrow have made their position rather more precarious. How much do they know?"

"I'm not entirely sure, but I know enough to suspect that they don't have as much as they would like. I think they're trying to force you to show your hand."

"How was this done?"

"Nash. You remember him from Tokyo."

"That I do."

"I think he's working for Cobol now, probably in exchange for his life. I have some evidence that suggests, very strongly, that he performed an extraction on Hanamura's daughter."

"Is that possible, Mr. Arthur?"

"Yes. Eames has pulled something like that off in the past."

There was another silence, and a faint scraping in the background that suggested that Saito had pushed his chair back and started to pace with the phone held to his ear. "I had not thought her a security risk. Even if he did talk to her about his work I did not think anyone would have performed an extraction on a dying child."

"What do you want me to do at this point?"

"This may be ethically and logistically difficult."

"I can't see how it could be more difficult than what you wanted us to do with the Fischer job."

"I will need you to perform an extraction on her. I need to know how much they know. Bring me that and I will take care of the rest myself."

"I'll work on that, Mr. Saito."

"Have a good evening, Mr. Arthur. Ms. Lee will coordinate with you on my behalf."

There was a click on the other end as Saito ended the call.

 

"What did he say?" Eames asked, as Arthur wheeled his own office chair back to the working side of his desk and then sat down. The remains of his dinner went into the plastic bag it had come in so it wouldn't clutter up his desk.

"What I expected him to say." Arthur sighed, softly as he pushed his cold, undrinkable cup of coffee aside and cleared room for his Strathmore paper. "He wants us to find out what Ichigo knows."

"We're going to need a labyrinth, then," Eames was performing tricks with the poker chip again, rolling it over his knuckles and twirling it around his index finger.

"I can do that. Overnight, if I have to," Arthur said. He flipped briefly through the pages of his drawing pad, reviewing the preliminary sketches he had done for the maze designs.

"Can you forge Hanamura's likeness?"

"Definitely."

"Good. I get the feeling we won't have much time."

 

His phone had started to ring again while he was pouring himself another cup of coffee. He answered the call with the coffeepot still in his hand. "Arthur."

"It's Lee. I got a call from Mr. Saito telling me what to do. I can be there in fifteen." Someone was talking to her, wherever she was, an older woman's voice, speaking a dialect that Arthur could not identify.

"I thought you were the night-shift nursing care for –" He reached for a second coffee cup and then hesitated. Cobb had once complained that Eames took his coffee like a little girl.

"I can ask my mother to keep an eye on him," she said, cutting him off. He heard the sound of her a car door slamming shut just before the call cut off.

 

Arthur had the mockup of a simple single-level layout drafted out when Lee showed up at the offices, half an hour late with a traffic ticket in her hand. "Coffee?" he asked, handing her the cup that Eames had declined to drink.

"Thanks," she said gratefully, as she took the cup in her hand and leaned against the office wall. Papers rustled against her shoulders as she shifted away from a thumbtack that jabbed her in the spine. "Mr. Saito called me to say you have proof that Cobol Engineering had someone perform an extraction on Hanamura's daughter."

"Showed up on the surveillance video you obtained," Arthur said. "The image is rather blurry, but I'd recognize Nash anywhere."

"Nash? The architect?" she asked, after a sip of coffee. Arthur nodded.

"The one who looks like a refugee from _Trainspotting_," Eames said. He had been playing a game of solitaire on Arthur's laptop while they had waited for Lee's arrival at the offices.

"Him," she said, with a faint look of distaste. "I always thought he was too clever for his own good, but I didn't think he'd be the kind of asshole to perform an extraction on a seven-year-old."

"With our orders, _we're_ going to be the kinds of assholes to perform an extraction on a seven-year-old. I doubt we have the moral high ground here." Eames reached across Arthur's desk and stole a sip of his coffee. He made a slight face at the taste and put the cup back down.

"I want to get this extraction done as soon as possible," Arthur said, looking up from his labyrinth. "Ichigo's terminally ill, and if we wait too long she might die before we can get the information that Saito needs. Can you get us into her hospital room?"

"I know a couple people who work there," Lee said. "She's in the pediatric ICU, which means they're going to be keeping a close eye on her visitors. I could probably buy the head nurse, too, but squaring her might take a couple days."

"That's fine," Arthur said. "I'm going to need that time to finish my labyrinth and do a dry run."

"I'll get on it," she said.


	3. Chapter 3

Arthur hated rushing extractions. More often than not things went wrong due to a fatal lack of attention or a hasty mistake. Life didn't always give him the option of doing things the way he preferred to, however, which was why he was currently standing rather too close to Eames in a hospital laundry room, putting on a doctor disguise.

"How do I look?" Arthur asked Lee. He had just finished putting on the horn-rimmed reading glasses that he had so often eschewed in the past.

"You're dressed too nicely to be an actual doctor. Like a refugee from a hospital drama," Lee said. "Lose the tie and the cufflinks. Roll those sleeves up." She had removed her windbreaker and jeans to reveal a nurse's uniform, and had just pulled her hair back into a severe bun. The uniform was European-style, with a smock-like tunic and a pair of trousers, almost scrub-like in its lack of fuss.

"If we're in a medical drama I'd be the Wilson to your House," Eames said as Arthur loosened his necktie and started to reverse the half-Windsor knot. He sniffed at the bouquet of gerbera daisies he was holding, part of his "concerned visitor" disguise.

"There isn't enough Vicodin in the world to make that sound like a good idea," Arthur said. The necktie came free with a soft whisper of silk and he folded it and tucked it into his trouser pocket before he undid the collar bar and his cufflinks. "Not especially if I have to put up with you, too."

"I could be Cuddy. I think I've watched enough of the show to forge her," Eames said.   
Arthur ignored his statement and rolled the sleeves of his shirt up, carefully. He stopped just below the elbow and then reached into the empty laundry cart to retrieve the gift bag that had been planted there by the orderly Lee had paid off earlier. Resting on the top of the bag's contents was a pristine white lab coat, neatly folded, and a stethoscope. Beneath the lab coat was the PASIV device in its matte aluminum casing.

"This is yours, I would believe," Arthur said as he handed the bag over to Eames, after taking the lab coat and the stethoscope out. He pulled the coat on after Eames took the bag, and tucked the stethoscope around his shoulders like a feather boa. His falsified ID tags rattled in the capacious pocket of the lab coat, and he drew them out and pinned them on.

"We'll meet back at Ichigo's room in ten minutes," Lee said to Eames before she and Arthur left the laundry room. "If anyone notices us, let me do the talking," she hissed to Arthur as they stepped out of the door into an empty hallway.

 

As it turned out they did not end up getting the two days of planning that Lee had worried buying the head nurse would take. One of her hospital contacts had called her at seven in the morning to notify her that Ichigo was going into hospice care soon, and everything fell into a controlled frenzy of activity shortly after. The problem they had was one of access; sneaking into a pediatric ICU for an extraction was tricky but solvable with sufficient bribery. Sneaking into a hospice with family members attending was almost impossible unless the next-of-kin were also in on this, which they were not.

Arthur had burned through more than a dozen cups of coffee getting his labyrinth done. His line work, normally static, detailed and precise, had, in the last few sketches, taken on a jittery, frenetic quality.

"I've sorted things with the head nurse," Lee said to Arthur as he rolled his sleeve up in preparation for a quick rehearsal run before the extraction itself later that evening. She had been sitting in the office pantry, talking on the phone for nearly two hours. At some point she had swapped cell phone batteries with Eames so she could continue the phone call. "She'll do this once, but never again."

"Hopefully once is all we're going to need," Eames said as he seated the needle in his wrist. "I am sorry about your contact."

"I would care less if she were just my contact. She's my _sister-in-law_. Never mind about that." She sighed. "We get the job done and I'll sort out the fallout on my personal life."

Eames and Arthur had exchanged a significant look at each other after that exchange. It had already become apparent why Saito had hired Lee in the first place, but this was a level of dedication that was wholly unheard of in the extraction scene.

 

Lee took him up the back stairs towards the pediatric ICU and handed him a half-smoked cigarette, which he put in a pocket. "If anyone asks," she said, "look guilty and pretend you just nipped off for a smoke break in the stairwell while I run interference."

"A smoke break?" Arthur asked, raising a brow.

"Doctors are worse than anyone else I know for filthy habits like that. A surgeon I once knew told me he was wasting his time if what he was doing wasn't Scotch, sex or surgery."

"Sounds like Eames' kind of work environment."

She laughed at that, a deep, throaty sound. "The way he talks to us, I'd fully expect him to be struck off the rolls for sexual harassment."

The hallway leading to Ichigo's room was accessible from the stairwell – that had been where Nash had been caught on the cameras when he had performed the extraction on her earlier. They passed the nursing station, where Lee exchanged a significant look and a nod with the head nurse, Lee's sister-in-law. God himself only knew what she thought was going on.

After a quick look around, Arthur stepped into Ichigo's room and half-drew the curtain around her bed so that they wouldn't be as visible to anyone who might step in. The last pictures Arthur had seen of the little girl had been taken at her seventh birthday party two months ago. She had been gaunt, and had worn a hat to hide the hair loss from chemotherapy, but there had still been a sense of life and joy in her face as she had blown out the candles on her cake. The present Ichigo was but a husk. She was profoundly unconscious, her yellow-tinged skin stretched to the point of translucency over edema-swollen limbs and a belly distended with fluid.

"Terminal liver failure," Lee whispered as she did a quick check of Ichigo's chart and the medical monitors by her bed. "They stopped chemotherapy about two weeks ago. Right now she's on painkillers and little else, which is probably a good thing. Less stuff in her system to interact with the somnacin."

There was a quick, hurried step and the sound of the door closing as Eames showed up half a minute late, bearing the bouquet of flowers and the PASIV in the gift bag.

"That was close," he said, stepping behind the curtain to join Arthur.

"Did someone spot you?" Arthur asked, turning Ichigo's arm over so he could hook her up to the PASIV.

"One of the nurses told me that visiting hours were over. I persuaded her to give me five minutes with a child whom I wasn't actually related to, and then hit one of the call buttons on the way out." He dropped the bouquet of flowers in the wastepaper basket, and then laid the PASIV on the nightstand.

"She didn't track you back here?" Arthur asked, his fingertips pressing gently on the inside of Ichigo's wrist. Her forearms were covered with bruises from repeated IV sticks, and her bones felt like fragile twigs in his grasp.

"Definitely not," Eames said as he popped the catches on the PASIV. He looked offended at the suggestion that he had been followed.

"I can't find a vein," Arthur said, giving up the search. He was afraid to press too hard against her wrist for fear of hurting her, unconscious as she was.

"Let me," Lee said as she put Ichigo's charts back in the holder on the foot of her bed. "We're going to have to use an ankle vein, and I have to adjust the dosage for her body weight." The fine needle slipped easily through her delicate skin, and Arthur let out a breath that he did not realize he had been holding when Lee finished wrapping the tether around Ichigo's swollen ankle.

"Are you ready?" he asked Eames as he sat down on one of the chairs present by Ichigo's bedside and hooked himself up to the PASIV. Eames nodded and sat down on the other beside him, wedging himself against the hospital bed before he put the needle in his own wrist.

"I'll keep an eye out," Lee said, "See you in ten minutes," she said before she pressed down on the infusion trigger. The pump hissed softly, and a drugged sleep reached up and wrapped its arms around Arthur, dragging him into the bloodwarm space behind his eyes.

 

Arthur had never been in a child's dreams before, and he wasn't sure if it was her age, the illness or the medication that had left her mindscape so fuzzy and ill defined. Individual details sharpened in his field of vision as he focused on them, but the general effect was softly blurred, as though he were viewing the world through a sheet of gauze. The perspective was subtly skewed and wrong to his adult point-of-view and the buildings all seemed more massive in scale.

He was standing with Eames in the playground of the school building that he had laid out over a frantic afternoon and around them both little children ran and played. The few adult projections in her mind loomed, vaguely, in a manner that wasn't so much threatening as much as just distant. Ichigo was sitting on a swing several yards away, her feet dangling off the floor as she plucked at the petals of a flower half-heartedly. Her school uniform was just a little too big for her, and one of her shoelaces was undone and muddy.

"Are you ready?" Arthur asked, glancing at the watch on his wrist. They would have a little over an hour to get the information Saito wanted. Eames took out what looked like a small powder compact from a pocket of his suit and flipped it open. He studied his reflection for a second or two, and then looked up at Arthur with Hanamura's face.

"What do you think?" Eames asked. His bluntly handsome features had been overwritten completely, his broad shoulders now slighter, stooped with the slight curled hunch of the perpetually put-upon. A speck of paper from a shaving cut stood out against his neck and his characteristic archness was nowhere to be found.

"Perfect," Arthur said, nodding his approval. "Now go pick her up from school. I'll take care of the rest.

 

Ichigo leapt out of the swing seat and ran straight into Eames' arms when she saw him. "Daddy!" she squealed, flinging her arms around his neck as he lifted her up into the air. "School's not over yet," she said with a giggle.

"I ditched work," Eames said with Hanamura's voice, his words colored with a perfectly mimicked Japanese accent. "Do you want to cut class and go out with me?"

"Does Mommy know?" she asked as he put her down and began to help her tie her shoelace. She stood patiently as he doubled up the knot so it wouldn't come loose again.

"We can tell her later," Eames said, straightening up from his crouch and dusting his hands off. The school bell rang in the background, marking the end of recess.

"Okay," she said, taking his hand.

Predictably enough Ichigo wanted to go out for fast food. Sophia Hanamura was something of a health-food freak, and since the divorce Ichigo had been fed a steady diet of macrobiotic food. At least, until she had fallen sick enough to require a feeding tube. Arthur watched them walk into the MOS Burger that he had planted conveniently across the street. Eames sat down facing the large plate-glass windows of the restaurant's façade as he had during the dry run they had performed hours earlier, so Arthur could signal him if needed.

Arthur entered the restaurant five minutes later. He ordered a meal and sat waiting for his cue, feeling vaguely embarrassed at the intrusion he was perpetrating and a strange, unfamiliar fury at Nash and Cobol Engineering for having forced this turn of events. True anger was something Arthur remained distinctly uncomfortable with especially when it was his own. This time he stalled it with the tactic he employed for situations like this where he had to remain cool and professional. He surrounded the irrational heat in his gut with facts, procedure and discipline, starving the blaze of oxygen so he could shelve the embers safely away while he did his job.

Arthur was picking half-heartedly at his own French fries when Eames caught his eye, and nodded once while Ichigo was busy picking at her croquette. He stood up from his seat, dumped his unfinished meal into the trash bin and pushed his chair back in. The plan was for Eames to simply charm and stall the little girl, turning the conversation in the direction of her father's job. Arthur had planted a safe in the offices several floors upstairs, and once Eames had Ichigo's attention on her memories of her father he could go upstairs and crack the safe for the data. His prior education in safecracking had been quite thorough, and he had brought all the tools that he would need in a messenger bag that he carried at his side.

The hallways of the building were more crowded than he had imagined, filled with more of the wispy, indistinct figures that he took for adult projections in Ichigo's subconscious. He noticed that time seemed to pass differently here; the second hand of his watch crawled a little more slowly than it should have by all rights. Arthur started to get ready as the elevator began its slow climb upstairs; he put on a pair of gloves and a two-way radio headset in case Eames needed to signal him while out of visual range. He had just finished when the elevator gave a hard lurch and then dropped hard, forcing him to his hands and knees. The lights flickered ominously twice, and then went out entirely.

"Bloody hell," he heard Eames hiss over the earpiece, then. "Arthur, it's a _trap_." A single static-filled gunshot rang into his ear before the sound cut out.

"What's happening? Eames?" he asked as he got to his feet and pried at the door of the elevator with both hands.

"Ichigo had a seizure and then her projections went berserk. I don't have time to explain, but _don't_ let them kill you unless you want never to wake up from this." There were more gunshots in the background, and something that sounded like the snorting, huffing growl of a great, angry beast. "Run fast, Arthur. Save a bullet for yourself."

"Damn it." Arthur swore, mostly to himself. He shed his suit jacket and pulled off his necktie, leaving both on the elevator floor, and then slung his bag around his neck with the shoulder strap. Three languages were not quite enough for the amount of swearing he needed as he first forced the doors open to find the elevator positioned between floors in the shaft. He dipped into the profane lexicons of two other languages as he reached up and pried the outer doors far enough apart for him to wriggle through, and then pulled himself up to the next floor, his clothes stained with grease. His messenger bag caught for a terrifying moment between his chest and the ledge, its strap preventing him from emerging fully, before he reached down one-handed and disconnected the strap from the d-ring. It started to slide down and away from him and back into the stalled elevator, but he caught the loose end of the strap just as he squirmed onto the floor and pulled the bag after him.

He had just crawled back to his feet when he realized he had been swearing in Swedish; a sixth language and one that he had had the barest acquaintance with. He reattached the strap of his bag and pulled it back onto his shoulder, and then drew the Glock from its holster behind his right hip. A quick glance at the signage in the lobby told him he had three more floors left to go to the offices upstairs. Under the low roar in the air was another snort, and a sour, charnel smell somewhere behind him. Arthur turned quickly and aimed reflexively at something that he saw more as a knot of shadow in the air and flickers of movement in his peripheral vision. Claws scraped and rattled against the granite flooring in the lobby, and he dropped the projection with a double-tap in its rough center of mass. The tinkle of the brass hitting the floor was almost lost in the sounds of moaning and growling coming from the hallways. He swore softly to himself, reholstered his sidearm and then ran towards the stairwell before they found him again.

 

"What the hell are these?" Arthur shouted breathlessly over the two-way headset at Eames, "These aren't normal projections. These aren't even militarized projections."

"What you're seeing are intrusions countermeasures," Eames shouted back at him, his voice broken up with static and punctuated with more gunshots. "Designed to kill extractors instead of just ejecting them."

"That's just an bullshit rumor," he managed to gasp as he took the steps two at a time. He heard more footsteps and moans several floors below him, the sounds amplified by the concrete stairwell.

"A rumor won't give you a fatal heart attack if it catches you in someone's mind." Eames yelled over his own gunfire, his voice pitched loudly enough that his words were accompanied with bursts of microphone noise.

"_Fuck,_" Arthur hissed, partly in frustration and partly because he heard the projections closing in on him. If he ducked out of the stairwell now they would catch him in and tear him to pieces, and he still had a job to do. He ran up another flight of stairs, shoved the stairwell door open with his shoulder and sprinted around a corner, down a hallway a floor above the offices containing the safe. He did not bother looking back as he ran hard for the one of the offices; the sounds of the door splintering told him just how close the beasts were. A rough calculation told him he had less than two minutes to make it to the floor beneath while cut off from the stairs. With that in mind he headed straight for the office above the one he had planted the safe in. He tested the doorknob and then ducked inside, locking the door behind him in an attempt to buy more time.   
He heard the door rattling in its frame as he ran to the back of the offices, where a pair of large plate-glass windows opened to the exterior of the building. As a matter of habit and procedure he used tempered glass in the windows of his dreamscapes whenever he could; its friable nature made breaking and entering much easier for many of the same reasons that it was considered a security risk. He drew his Glock and shot both of the windows out in showers of tiny glass cubes, and then tested the window frame to see if it would take his weight.

A series of scrapings and scrabblings told him he didn't have the time to ponder safety considerations; if he fell, he would probably wake up, which was better than what he expected these projections to do to him. He reached down and pulled a power strip out of the wall socket it had been plugged into, reeling the wire into a loose loop in his hands. The door had started to buckle and splinter as he finished tying the plug end of the wire around the window frame with a round turn and a pair of half-hitches. A quick cynical prayer followed, and then he swung out of the empty window frame, onto the outside of the building.

"I hope you're almost done, Arthur," Eames sighed, over the radio channel. "I'm pinned down and there's too many of them. I'm out of here."

The call cut out before he could hear the gunshot on the other end, and Arthur knew better than to waste time with an answer. Instead he kicked hard at the window in an attempt that shook it but did not break it. He let go of his improvised rope with his right hand, drew his Glock and shot the downstairs window out, too. A crashing above told him the projections had broken through the door, and he had started to reholster his sidearm when he felt the taut wire start to vibrate under the strain of his weight and whatever the projections were doing to the window frame above.

There was a creak and a groan barely audible under the roaring in the background and the snorting of the projections, and he reached his right arm through the downstairs window frame just as the rope went slack and he started to fall. He let go of the Glock and caught himself against the concrete lip of the window aperture with a bone-jarring crunch that bruised him across the chest and flank and drove the air out of his lungs. He wanted to swear very much at the pain and terror but lacked the air to do so, and his attempts at profanity were further forestalled by a metallic clinking above him. The window frame he had hitched the wire to fell out of the wall above a split second later, provoking a bright, incandescent pain as it clipped him across the back and shoulders. His right arm had gone numb from the bicep down, and he reached up with his left and clung to the window edge before he lost his grip entirely and smeared himself across the pavement far below. He took a second to catch his breath again, and then tested the fingers of his right hand against the interior wall of the office as he felt sensation start to return.

The window frame scraped painfully against his belly and hips as he clawed his way into the room, scraping his cheek against the rough carpet as he fell into the room. A vague warmth across his back told him that he was probably bleeding freely from the window hit, but he did not try to touch it; he didn't want his hands slippery while he tried to crack the safe. His Glock had bounced across the office floor after he had let go of it, and it rested a yard away from where he was currently sprawled. He wanted to just lie there and rest a minute, but he knew the projections were probably closing in on his location, and that he didn't have much time to spare. He stood, slowly and painfully, and picked his gun off the office floor; it took him three tries to put it back in its holster with fingers that tingled from what he suspected was nerve damage. He then staggered into the room the safe was held in, leaving drops and smears of his own blood in a messy trail behind him.

He crouched down by the safe and tore off his headset before he started work; with Eames dead and out of the dream he would not need it anyway. The safecracking itself was, fortunately, a relatively simple task, even with the fingertips of his right hand burning from neuropathic pain. He was intimately familiar with the make of safe he had planted in this dreamscape and knew the points he could drill through without triggering the glass relocker that would lock the bolts into place. The cordless drill in the bag he was carrying had been equipped with a special-purpose bit capable of eating through the hardplates the safe had been built with; the tungsten chips in the metal would destroy a normal bit in an attempt at drilling an observation hole.

He had to brace his trembling right hand with his left to position the drill bit correctly, but once he had started it took him less than five minutes to drill through the plate. He then pulled out a flexible fiberscope from his toolbag and fed it through the hole in the top of the safe, angling it so he could catch a good look at the innards of the combination lock. The fingertips of his right hand were still numb enough that he could not rely on his sense of touch, and he shifted over to the other side of the safe so he could use his left hand to work the dial.

At this point Arthur was shaking enough from pain and exhaustion that he fumbled the careful process of disengaging the bolts twice, wasting precious minutes as he aligned the lock gates all over again. A low, subsonic roar rattled the intact windows of the building as he opened the door of the safe. Resting within it was a small, cheap diary covered in stickers. He reached in with his left hand and drew it out, and then sat down by the safe and started flipping through the pages. The cuts on his back itched and stung as he rested himself against the wall. Ichigo's handwriting was childish, the letters large and somewhat wobbly, detailing what she knew of her father's work in misspelled prose.

The door to the office started rattling and splintering as he started speed-reading his way through the diary, committing the relevant details to his memory. The bellows outside told him that the projections had finally tracked him down to this level after his window escape, but he paid them no mind as he continued reading, attaching salient points of data to features of the memory palace he had built in his own mind. He was almost to the last entry when he heard a loud crash outside; the sound of the doorframe itself falling to the ground with the door still shut. Arthur dropped the journal and drew the Glock, fumbling at the holster with his nerveless right hand. He gripped the pistol in the fingers of his left hand, and then held it up to his head. "See you later," he said as one of the projections drew into view down the hallway, a spiky, umbral shape made of horns and snarls of shadow, a night terror incarnate.

Dying did not hurt at all this time.

 

Arthur kicked out of his drugged sleep, gasping like a landed fish. He clawed futilely at the air for balance as he fell out of the chair. Eames caught him before he could hit the floor, and he realized that the roar he had heard in the background of the dream was actually the high whine of Ichigo's medical monitor. "Are you all right?" he asked, steadying Arthur in his arms. Eames' face was pale beneath the flush of sunburn, and his gaze was haunted and opaque from what he had seen in the dream.

"I've been better," Arthur wheezed, his throat tight with strain as he reached up to pull the IV out of his own wrist, only to find that he had torn himself free of the needle and its tether as he had struggled awake.

"She's coding," Lee said as Eames pulled Arthur roughly to his feet. "We can talk about this later, but we have to go before the crash team gets here." The head nurse stood in the doorway, glancing out behind her shoulder with a worried look on her face.

"They're on their way," she said to Lee.

Arthur nodded and stumbled blindly past the nurse, out of Ichigo's room. They made for the relative safety of the stairwell, Eames close behind him with the locked PASIV unit in his grip. After the door shut behind him he stopped, sitting on the stairs for a few minutes, to regain his composure.

"What happened in there?" Lee whispered, as Arthur wiped at his eyes and tried to slow his racing pulse. She sat down beside him and her fingers were cool and gentle against inside of his wrist as she pressed down to stop the bleeding from the IV needle. He must have looked terrible; he was aware of a cold sweat still trickling down his temples and down the nape of his neck.

"Those Cobol bastards had someone militarize Ichigo's subconscious. Her projections nearly tore us apart in there," Eames said, his voice hoarse with an anger that Arthur could only guess at. That was not the absolute truth, but Arthur did not describe what they had encountered.

"I got the data, but I don't like to think that I helped cause this," Arthur said as he pulled himself up by the railing on the stairs. His forged nametags clinked against the metal as he shrugged the lab coat off and left it crumpled on the floor.

"She was already dying when we got to her, Arthur," Lee said, squeezing him gently around the shoulders, "I don't think what we did made her code, if that's what you're saying."

Arthur shook his head once and let out a long sigh. He saw the doubt and anger hidden behind Eames' face and felt his own guilt coiling slickly in his belly. He slipped his hand into his trouser pocket and found the die nudging up against his cufflinks and collar bar, his fingertips playing against the weighted plastic. "Let's get out of here," he said. "I don't see any reason to hang around any more."

 

Eames was the first to leave the hospital, in the Benz that he had left in visitor parking. Lee took a shuttle bus out to a train station. Arthur took a detour so he could discard his lab coat and stethoscope in a garbage can, and then caught a cab in the outpatient taxi line. He had the cabdriver take him to one of the big shopping centers on Orchard Road, and then caught another cab back to the hotel. Back in his room Arthur booked himself a plane ticket to Tokyo, on a plane that was leaving at six AM tomorrow. The caffeine and adrenaline filled him with a brittle, nervous energy that made him want to pace the floor and punch the walls. Instead he turned off his cellphone and went to the hotel pool for a swim.

He lost count of the laps he did, pulling himself through the water as though escaping from his mind and all the memories that it had held. He swam mindlessly until his arms felt like jelly and his sinuses burned with chlorinated water. The physical exertion stilled the trembling and he felt a fragile calm returning as he clung to the edge of the pool. Despite that Arthur found himself walking towards the offices out of a longing for something to do. He had been exhausted from the swimming, nauseated, even, but his attempts at rest had been thwarted by a frustration so intense that he could taste it lingering at the back of his throat like the bitter aftertaste from a dose of cough syrup. The rooms were empty when he arrived upstairs, silent except for the low hum of the air-conditioning units. Everything had been exactly the way he had left it when they had left to perform the extraction earlier that day, but nothing felt the same any more.

He went into the conference room where he had worked the past few days and started on the process of breaking down their temporary HQ. It was something that he would have done sooner or later now that the extraction was over, but he itched for something physical to do, to distract him from the anger and guilt that he had been feeling since he had left the hospital. He went through his sketches and the dossiers; the notes pinned through the walls, and reached up to pull the tacks out of the walls. The fury he had suppressed broke through then, bright and hot and vivid, and he started ripping papers off the walls and shredding them in his hands. His actions were slow and methodical, the sound of tearing paper punctuating his own sullen silence. The photocopied pages tore easily into gray confetti; the Strathmore drawing paper took a bit more effort, as it was stiff enough to sting the pads of his fingers slightly as he tore it up.

He stopped shredding when he came to the photo of Ichigo at her seventh birthday party. Instead he took the photograph off the wall and studied the glossy paper for a long moment. Her parents did not look at each other in any of the photographs he had seen, but they both looked at her in this one, the guttering center of their life. He moved as though to tear it in half, hesitated, and then left it on his desk before he continued shredding the documents by hand.

The controlled destruction calmed him and wrung some of the brittle anger out of his system. When he was done he had destroyed almost every piece of documentation that would have traced him back to the job. He stood in the middle of a floor covered in torn paper, fallen leaves of lives and memories rustling at his feet and under the soles of his loafers. It would have been neater and more expedient, perhaps, to run everything through a paper shredder, but this was more cathartic.

"I thought I'd find you here again," Eames said from the doorway of Arthur's former workroom. The card-lock's opening beep had been lost in the sound of tearing paper, and Arthur had been too preoccupied to notice when he had come in. "Lee got worried about you when you didn't answer your phone."

Arthur glanced over to the chair he had draped his suit jacket over; he had left the cell phone in one of the pockets and not bothered to look at it. "She can stop worrying now," he said. "I was just busy."

"She got a call from her contact at the hospital," Eames said, "They were able to get Ichigo stable again, and she thought we would want to know about that." He walked into the conference room, kicking up little drifts of shredded paper as he walked into the middle of the room where Arthur had been standing. "Are you feeling any better?" he asked after he sat down in one of the office chairs.

"To be honest, I'm not sure how I'm feeling right now," Arthur said, raising a brow at the shopping bag Eames had placed on his desk. The top of a bottle of Laphroaig peeked out the bag, packaged in its plain, distinctive black and white tube.

"What are you going to do after this?" Eames asked. He had picked up the photograph off Arthur's desk and was looking at it. He had kept his facial expression carefully neutral, but his eyes were dark with suppressed emotion. Arthur knew that Eames was not the kind of person who showed his real feelings easily; the lightness of his fury was, paradoxically, rather more frightening than anything more overt.

"Tomorrow I'm going to Tokyo so I can make my report to Saito. I'm going Stateside once that's over. I need to warn Cobb." He retrieved the first DVD from the disc drive of his laptop and snapped it in half, and then into quarters. "What about you?"

"London," he said, before he slipped Ichigo's photograph into his shirt pocket. Arthur did not stop him. "I need to talk to a former colleague or two."

"Was this about what we faced back in the dream?" Arthur asked as he broke the second DVD into fragments. His fingertips ached slightly from the sharp-edged pieces of plastic.

Eames hesitated for a moment, before nodding, once. "I'd appreciate it if you kept it to yourself for now," he said, "at least until I find out how Cobol got their hands on it."

"If this is as big as I think is," Arthur said carefully, "I'm going to have to warn everyone who's worked with Cobb since the Cobol job. Which would mean – us. Ariadne. Yusuf. Saito."

"I'll tell you what I find out." Eames drew the bottle of Scotch out of the shopping bag and slit the tape sealing the tube with Arthur's X-acto knife.

"You're not going to drink that here, are you?" Arthur asked. He had just finished settling his laptop in its bag, and was now scooping up his collection of pencils and technical pens from where he had left them scattered across his desk. They rattled softly against each other as he dropped them into a pencil case.

"As a matter of fact, I am." Eames said, as he started to crack the seal on the bottle. "It isn't as though they can book me for drunk driving if I do indulge this time. I walked here."

Arthur shook his head and carefully plucked the X-acto out of Eames' fingers before he could open the bottle. He made sure to put the plastic cap back over the blade before he put it back in the pencil case. "I don't want to have to carry you back to your hotel room again. Or have you forgotten Prague?"

"In my defense I'm not entirely sure how much I still remember about Prague." Eames said as he toasted Arthur playfully with the sealed bottle of whisky.

"My point exactly." Arthur picked up his laptop bag and hefted it with a soft sigh. He was starting to notice his fatigue now that he had gotten most of the anger out of his system.

"All right, all right, mum. Let's go back to the hotel," The heavy atmosphere in the room lifted minutely as some of the old archness started to seep back into Eames' manner, displacing some of the anger they both felt. "Maybe I'll even share some of this Scotch with you."

 

In the end Eames drank the Laphroaig on his own, half-reclining on Arthur's bed while Arthur had packed his bags for the flight out tomorrow. Arthur loved the idea of single malt Scotch – the tradition, the purity, the way the distilleries were tied intimately to the geographies they nestled in, but the reality was something else entirely, and he had never been able to get over the peaty, iodine flavors that he kept encountering with whisky like this.

"I once heard a little anecdote about this particular single malt," he said to Eames as he opened his suitcase. "Laphroaig was one of the few whiskys legally imported during the US during Prohibition because nobody could imagine drinking it for non-medicinal reasons."

"You Yanks and your fatal lack of taste," Eames said, saluting Arthur with his empty tumbler. He poured himself another dram from the bottle he had left on Arthur's nightstand and swirled it around extravagantly in the glass.

"I'm not sure a taste like chewing a piece of peat while gargling a mix of standing seawater and Everclear is something I want to acquire," Arthur put his suit jackets away in his garment bag and folded the rest of his clothing methodically, leaving the black Burberry out in the hotel room closet so he could wear it on the flight out to Tokyo, where it was still winter. There was something absurd about that. A winter interrupted by a slice of ridiculous tropical heat, bookended in his choice of clothing. His overcoat hung in the wardrobe, ready for his departure as he packed his neckties away into his suitcase.

"I have an apology to make," Arthur said after he had run through the displacement activity of packing. He hesitated, and then sat down opposite Eames on the other side of the bed. He thought for a moment about mixing himself a drink from the mini-bar in his room, but did not. He was leaving for Tokyo somewhere between very late and very early, and he did not want to drink himself to sleep.

"You did nothing wrong during the extraction or before it." Eames said. "What we both found in the girl's head should never have been there in the first place."  
Arthur shook his head and lay down, still fully dressed, beside Eames, who put his tumbler down on the nightstand. He rested most of his weight on an elbow and watched Arthur, his expression unreadable.

"I'm not apologizing for that," Arthur said, after he had tucked his hands behind his head. "Back at the airport, when I first got here. I told you that we weren't friends. I'm sorry."

Eames did not answer. Instead he stood up and poured a single finger of Scotch into the tumbler. Arthur could not see his face from where he was lying, but he could see the shift in Eames' body language, in the movement of his back and shoulders, and it was a minor surprise when he turned and handed the glass to Arthur. "Medicinal," he said as Arthur propped himself in a half-sitting position to take the glass. "You _are_ feeling all right, right?"

"I'm deadly serious," Arthur said. He knocked back the shot of Laphroaig and fought a wince as he felt the intense iodine flavor burn through his throat and sinuses. A faint whisper of violets and vanilla lingered on his tongue as a gentle oily heat spread behind his heart.   
A slow, wicked smile spread across Eames' face as he took back the tumbler. "Are you sure you don't want to help me finish this?" he said, gesturing in the direction of the bottle. "Friends and all."

"If you want to finish that you're going to do it in your own room. I have a flight to catch at six tomorrow," Arthur said. He stood, his unsteadiness more from exhaustion than drink, and shooed Eames gently towards the door.

"Be careful out there," Eames said with surprising seriousness as he backed out of Arthur's room, the bottle of whisky in his hand.

"Go to sleep, Mr. Eames." Arthur said, with a smile, before he shut the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry I didn't say anything about Nash, but I'd have spoiled this whole thing if he'd actually shown up in the character listing. I do plan for slash content in their future as I follow Arthur squaring things with Cobol. I did not originally intend for this fic to be this huge, but _Inception_ is eating my brain.


End file.
